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Dessert

Baked Pear Pickles

A baked pickle made from pears, sugar, cider vinegar, cinnamon, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Baked Pear Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the pears in a two-gallon stone jar.

  2. Add sugar, cider vinegar, and the cinnamon and cloves in cloth bags.

Bake and store

  1. Bake until the pears are tender.

  2. Store in the same jar for winter.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pear + cidertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Form the fruit base, softening during baking and absorbing the sweet, spiced liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, in quantity, helps preserve the fruit by drawing out moisture.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sugar and helps preserve the pears.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavor to the syrup and fruit.
Cloves
Adds pungent, warm aroma and flavor to the syrup and fruit.

The step that matters

Bake until the pears are tender. Pears must be fully softened so they can absorb the sugar and vinegar syrup. Underbaked pears stay firm and bland, while overbaking can make them collapse into mush.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Quincefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cider, vinegar, cinnamon, clove. 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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