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To Stew Pears

Stewed pears simmered in sugar syrup with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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To Stew Pears

Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Stew Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Pare the pears and stick a clove in the blossom end.

  2. Place them in a well-tinned saucepan with a new pewter spoon in the middle.

Stew and sweeten

  1. Fill the saucepan with hard water and set it over a low fire for 3 to 4 hours until the pears are soft and the water reduces.

  2. Add enough loaf sugar to create a thick syrup and boil the pears in it.

  3. Cut some lemon peel into strips and hang them around the pears.

Serve

  1. Serve the pears in a deep dish with the syrup.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Large cooking pears
Firm fruit that softens during long stewing while holding its shape.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the water and forms a thick syrup that coats the pears.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic citrus oils that flavour the syrup as the pears cook.

The step that matters

Keeping the low fire steady over 3 to 4 hours. A gentle, steady heat softens the pears evenly and reduces the water into syrup without scorching or breaking the fruit apart.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, clove, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, clove, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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