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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking pears with sugar and water, optionally flavored with cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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. Pare, halve, and core the pears.

  2. If the pears are hard, boil them in water until tender, using the water for the syrup.

  3. Use ¾ cup sugar for each pound of fruit.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar with water for a few moments, skim, and cool.

  2. When lukewarm, add the pears and boil gently until the syrup penetrates and the pears look clear.

  3. Remove any pieces that cook faster than the others.

Finish and jar

  1. Once done, take out the pears, boil down the syrup a little, and pour it over the pears.

  2. Add a few cloves for flavor if desired.

  3. Pack into small jars with glass or tin tops and seal with putty.

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

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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, which softens and turns translucent as the sugar syrup penetrates.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps preserve the fruit and keep it clear.

The step that matters

Gentle boil until the pears look clear. Boiling too hard can break the pears apart, while stopping too early leaves them opaque and unevenly sweetened. Gentle heat lets the syrup penetrate the fruit evenly.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar. 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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