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Pear Marmalade

A preserved fruit spread made by boiling pears and sugar until a soft‑crack consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Boil the pears in water for a few minutes.

  2. Remove the pears, peel, and cut them into pieces.

  3. Return the pieces to the pot and boil until tender.

  4. Pass the cooked pears through a colander using a wooden pestle.

Make the marmalade

  1. Weigh the pulp and add 12 oz of sugar for every pound of pulp.

  2. Clarify the sugar and boil it until it reaches the soft crack stage.

  3. Remove from heat, mix in the pulp, and return to the heat.

  4. Boil until it reaches the same consistency as apricot marmalade.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the fruit pulp that gives the marmalade its body and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Boil until it reaches the same consistency as apricot marmalade. As water evaporates, the sugar and pear pectin concentrate and gel together. Stopping too early leaves the marmalade runny, while cooking too long makes it stiff and sticky once cooled.

“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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