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Pickled Pears

A preserved pear dish made by boiling pears with sugar, vinegar, cloves, and cassia buds.

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

Why it works: Clove and cassia match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 194 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and halve the pears.

  2. If the pears are hard, scald them slightly before adding the vinegar.

Make the pickling syrup

  1. Combine 4 pounds of sugar and 1 gallon of vinegar in a pot.

  2. Add cloves and cassia buds, pounded and tied in a cloth.

  3. Boil the mixture.

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. Clove + cassiatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together194 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + peartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the pears in the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the fruit.
Cloves
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Cassia buds
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Scalding hard pears before adding the vinegar. Heat softens the firm fruit tissue, so the hot vinegar syrup can penetrate and the pears become tender rather than staying hard and tough.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

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