Skip to main content
Dessert

To Preserve Pears

Pears are boiled, then preserved in a sugar syrup.

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

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 ↓

To Preserve Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Pare the pears and weigh them.

  2. Boil the pears whole in a little water until soft, then remove them.

Make the syrup

  1. Measure out ½ cup of the boiling water.

  2. For every pound of sugar, add 1 pound of fruit to the water and sugar mixture.

  3. Boil the mixture in syrup for half an hour.

Pack the jar

  1. Place the pears in a jar.

  2. Pour the cooled syrup over them.

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 softens during boiling and holds its shape in the syrup.
Sugar
Preserves the fruit and gives the syrup its sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Boil the pears whole until soft. Heat softens the fruit's cell walls so it becomes tender enough to absorb syrup. Boiling too long can break the pears down into mush, so check them as they soften.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes