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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from pears, lemons, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pear 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 ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lemons finely and let them stand in 1 quart of water for 86 hours.

  2. Peel and slice the pears very finely.

Cook

  1. Cook the lemons in the water for 1 hour.

  2. Add the pears to the pot and cook for 1 hour longer.

  3. Stir in the sugar and cook for an additional hour.

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. Lemon + peartop 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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin, which helps the marmalade thicken and set.
Pears
Provide the bulk of the fruit, body and mild pear flavor.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps the pectin set and preserves the mixture.

The step that matters

Stir in the sugar and cook for an additional hour. Pectin and acid only form a gel once enough sugar is dissolved and the mixture has reduced. Adding the sugar and continuing to simmer concentrates the mixture so it can set rather than stay runny.

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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