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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made by cooking pears with sugar and water until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Weigh, pare, halve, and core the desired amount of pears.

  2. Place the pears in a preserving pan and barely cover them with cold water.

  3. Simmer gently until the pears are tender.

Make the syrup

  1. Remove the pears and boil the cooking liquid with the skins and cores for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the liquid and make a syrup by boiling 1½ pounds of sugar with 1 quart of the strained liquid for every 2 pounds of fruit.

  3. Boil the syrup until it thickens when a small amount is poured on a plate.

Finish and store

  1. Stir the pears into the syrup and boil together for a few minutes.

  2. Transfer the marmalade into jars, cover, and store in a cool, dry place.

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 body and flavor that form the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it boils, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until it thickens. Sugar must be concentrated enough for the marmalade to gel when cooled. Underboiled syrup stays runny, while overboiling can make the set too stiff, so the plate test checks the point of set.

“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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