Why it works: Sugar and pear 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 ↓
Canned Pears
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Combine 6 cups of sugar and 3 cups of water in a preserving kettle and boil for 5 minutes.
Prepare and cook the pears
Peel, halve, core, and rinse as many pears as will fit in the syrup.
Cook the pears slowly until tender.
Jar and seal
Transfer the pears into hot jars using a fork.
Strain the syrup and fill the jars with boiling hot syrup, then seal the jars.
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.
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Sugar + peartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Sugar
- Sweetens the syrup and helps the pears keep their shape and moisture.
- Pears
- Provide the fruit, which softens and becomes tender as it cooks in the syrup.
The step that matters
Cook the pears slowly until tender. Gentle heat softens the pears by breaking down their cell walls and pectin. Cooking too hard or too long can make them mushy and cause them to fall apart in the jars.
“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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