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Dessert

Preserved Pears

Preserved pears are sweetened and cooked with lemon rind and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the pears, removing the cores.

  2. Place the pears in a bowl and sprinkle the sugar over them.

  3. Let the pears sit for 24 hours.

Cook and finish

  1. Simmer the pears with the lemon rind for 3 hours.

  2. After 3 hours, remove from heat and add the lemon juice.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. 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 bulk of the preserve.
Sugar
Draws moisture out of the pears and acts as a preservative and sweetener.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Simmering for 3 hours. Sugar and fruit must cook long enough for the sugar to concentrate and the pears to soften fully, while the mixture is kept from scorching. Gentle, steady heat helps the fruit keep its shape and the syrup thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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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