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Dessert

Pears, Wet

Pears cooked in light syrup, repeatedly boiled and drained 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 ↓

Pears, Wet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Prick the pears all over with a fork.

  2. Place the pears in a pan with enough water to cover them.

  3. Cook the pears until soft, checking by feeling them.

  4. Transfer the pears to cold water and peel them carefully.

  5. Soak the pears in cold water, then blanch them again until a pin can easily pierce them.

Syrup and soak

  1. Drain the pears and place them in light syrup.

  2. Let the syrup boil over the pears twice, then skim the surface.

  3. Transfer the pears to an earthen pan.

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

  5. Repeat this process for four days, boiling the syrup to a greater consistency each time before adding the pears.

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
Main fruit; cooking softens its flesh so it becomes tender and sweet in the syrup.
Light syrup
Sugar syrup that sweetens the pears and, as it thickens over days, preserves them.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup boiling over four days. Each day the syrup must be boiled to a thicker consistency before the pears return. Sugar concentration rising gradually draws water out of the fruit and preserves it; rushing this leaves the pears watery and prone to spoiling.

“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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