Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Preserves

Preserved pears cooked in a sugar syrup with lemon peel and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the pears.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a pot and boil until clear.

  2. Add bits of lemon peel to the syrup.

Cook the pears

  1. Place the pears in the syrup and heat through.

  2. Remove the pears, let them cool, then return them to the syrup and cook until soft.

  3. For small pears, leave them whole and insert a clove in the end.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Lemon + clovetop 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

Pears
Provide the fruit body and texture that softens during the long simmer.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and thickens the syrup, helping preserve the pears.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic oils and a hint of acidity to the syrup.
Cloves
Contribute warm, spicy aroma that infuses the whole pears.

The step that matters

Let the pears cool before returning them to the syrup. Cooling the heated pears lets them firm up slightly, so they hold their shape while simmering until soft. Returning them hot straight from the syrup risks breaking them down into mush.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes