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Sweet Pickled Pears

A preserved pear dish made by cooking pears in a sugar, spice, and vinegar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar, whole spices, and vinegar together for 10 minutes.

Prepare and cook the pears

  1. Pare the pears, removing the blossom end with a knife while keeping the stems.

  2. Cook the pears in the syrup until tender.

Pack and store

  1. Pack the pears in jars and pour the syrup over them.

  2. Store in stone 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + peartop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the pears in the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickled pears their sharp flavour.
Whole spices
Add aroma and warm flavour to the syrup that the pears absorb.
Pears
Main fruit that softens in the syrup and takes on its flavour.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, allspice, clove, cinnamon, vinegar, pear. 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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