Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓
Pear Compote
Ingredients
Directions
Boil the pears in water until soft to the touch.
Peel the pears and scrape the stalks.
Place the pears in cold water to cool, then drain them.
Put the pears into the syrup and boil on a strong fire until perfectly done.
If the syrup is not sufficiently reduced, remove the pears and boil the syrup until it thickens.
For white pears, add lemon juice to the syrup while boiling.
Serve the pears in the syrup.
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.
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Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together942 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
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Pear + syruptop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together254 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
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Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,235 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
Swap the lemon
The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, syrup):
- Vanillafits better
- Plumfits better
- Apricotfits better
- Lemonthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against pear, syrup. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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