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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made from pears, sugar, candied ginger, and lemon, boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the pears very thin.

  2. Cut the ginger root thin.

  3. Wash the lemons.

  4. Boil the lemons whole in clear water until tender, without piercing them.

  5. Slice the lemons.

  6. Remove the seeds from the sliced lemons.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the pears and ginger with the sugar slowly for one hour.

  2. Add the sliced lemons to the pear mixture.

  3. Boil the mixture for one hour longer.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Pears
Provide the bulk and body of the marmalade as they break down during long boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps it set into a thick spread.
Candied ginger root
Adds warm, spicy aroma and a bit of sweet bite to the pears.
Lemons
Add acidity and aromatic peel flavour that brightens the sweet pears.

The step that matters

Boil the lemons whole until tender, without piercing them. Piercing lets juices and pectin-rich pulp escape and can make the peel bitter or tough. Cooking them whole keeps the peel intact and softens it evenly before slicing.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, lemon. 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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