Skip to main content
Dessert

Jargonelle Pears, to Preserve

Pears preserved in a sugar syrup, optionally flavored with lemon rind and colored with cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Jargonelle Pears, to Preserve

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Gather pears before they are fully ripe.

  2. Peel the pears thinly, remove the black tops, and pick out the seeds.

  3. Weigh the fruit and simmer gently until tender but unbroken.

  4. Drain the pears.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pound of sugar and ½ pint of water for every pound of pears.

  2. Boil the syrup for 5–6 minutes, removing scum.

  3. Add the pears to the syrup and simmer for 5 minutes.

  4. Carefully lift the pears out and place them in a dish, ensuring they are covered with syrup for 2 days.

  5. Return the pears to the pan and simmer until clear, but do not break them.

  6. Optionally add lemon rind for flavor and cochineal for color.

Jar and serve

  1. Transfer the fruit to jars, pour the syrup over, and cover securely.

  2. Serve in syrup or dry in a cool oven.

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 that is softened and preserved in the sugar syrup.
Sugar
Preserves the fruit and gives the syrup its sweetness.

The step that matters

Simmering the pears until clear but unbroken. Pears must be cooked gently so the flesh softens and becomes translucent without the fruit falling apart. Rapid boiling breaks down the cell structure, so the pears turn mushy and lose their shape.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes