Skip to main content
Dessert

Canned Pears

A preserved pear dish made by cooking pears in a sugar and water syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Canned Pears

Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Canned Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Pare the pears and cook them whole with stems left on, or cut them in halves or quarters, removing the cores.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup with 1 part sugar and 2 parts water.

Cook and can

  1. Cook the pears in the syrup until they look transparent and can be pierced easily with a stiff straw or knitting needle.

  2. Can the pears as desired.

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

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

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

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

  3. 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 fruit that softens and turns translucent as it cooks in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it in the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook the pears until pierceable. Pears must be cooked until a straw or needle passes through easily, since firm fruit stays hard and uneven in the jar. Under-cooked pears can also be less safely preserved, so the test matters before canning.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Allspicefits less 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.

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesSoft Ginger CakeSoft Ginger Cake56 recipes