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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking pears with sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Pare and core the pears, cutting large ones into halves or fourths and leaving small ones whole with the stem on.

  2. Combine sugar with enough water to make syrup in a porcelain kettle and stir until dissolved.

  3. Boil the syrup for 10-15 minutes.

  4. Add the prepared pears to the syrup, cooking them separately if needed.

  5. Cook slowly for 20 minutes.

Rest and repeat

  1. Carefully transfer the fruit to a stone jar and cover the jar with cloth.

  2. Let it sit in a cool place overnight.

  3. Drain the syrup back into the kettle and boil the syrup for 10 minutes.

  4. Return the fruit to the syrup and cook slowly for another 20 minutes.

  5. Transfer back to the stone jar and let sit overnight again.

Finish and jar

  1. Boil the syrup briefly the next day.

  2. Add the fruit to the syrup and cook slowly until clear and tender enough to pierce with a straw.

  3. Put the preserves in glass jars and seal the jars.

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

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

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 becomes tender and clear as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until clear and tender enough to pierce with a straw. Slow cooking lets sugar syrup gradually penetrate the pear tissue, so the fruit turns clear and softens evenly. Rushing with high heat can break the pears apart and leave them firm inside.

“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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