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Dessert

Italian Confectioner

Pears are boiled, peeled, and simmered in light syrup over several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and syrup work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 254 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Italian Confectioner

Ingredients

Directions

Blanch the pears

  1. Prick the pears all over with a fork.

  2. Place them in a pan with enough water to cover and heat until soft.

  3. Remove the pears and plunge them into cold water, then peel them carefully.

  4. Soak the peeled pears in cold water, then return them to heat to finish blanching until a pin can easily pierce them.

Syrup soak

  1. Drain the pears and place them in a light syrup, allowing it to boil over them twice.

  2. Skim the syrup and transfer the pears to an earthen pan.

  3. The next day, drain the pears and boil the syrup a little longer, adding new syrup if needed.

  4. Repeat this process for four days, then drain the syrup and boil it to a great pearl before returning the pears for a final boil.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pear + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together254 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the fruit that softens during blanching and absorbs the syrup to become the confection.
Light syrup
Sweetens the pears and, when boiled down over several days, builds the thick sugary coating.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup boiling over four days. Sugar slowly replaces the water in the pear tissue as the syrup is boiled and reheated over several days. Boiling too hard or too briefly can cause the syrup to crystallise or leave the pears watery, so the syrup must be reheated carefully each day.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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