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Dessert

Preserved Pears

A preserved pear recipe using pears, sugar, ginger, lemons, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the pears and lemons very thin.

  2. In a pot, combine water, sugar, and ginger root to prepare the syrup.

Cook the fruit

  1. Heat the syrup to boiling, then add the pears and lemons.

  2. Boil until the pears are very tender and almost clear.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the pears, ginger root, and lemons, then boil the syrup down until thick.

  2. Pour the thick syrup over the pears and lemons.

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 main fruit body, which softens and turns translucent as it cooks in syrup.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that preserves the fruit and, boiled down, thickens into a glaze.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavor and helps balance the sweetness of the syrup.
Ginger root
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup as it steeps.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup down until thick. Sugar concentrates as water evaporates, so the syrup thickens as it cools. Stopping too early leaves it thin, and boiling too long can crystallize or over-darken it.

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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