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Dessert

Pears, Frosted or Iced

Pears are stewed, then coated with a powdered sugar and lemon icing.

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

Pears, Frosted or Iced

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Stew the pears whole in syrup until tender, then dry them well.

Make the icing

  1. Beat the egg white to a firm froth.

  2. Add powdered sugar, lemon juice, and a few drops of cold water to the egg white, then beat until thick and smooth.

Ice and set

  1. Cover the pears evenly with the icing.

  2. Set the pears in a warm place or a cool oven to stiffen the icing.

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).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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
Serve as the fruit base, becoming tender when stewed in syrup.
Egg white
Whipped to a froth, it forms the airy structure of the icing.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the icing and thickens it into a smooth coating when beaten.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps stabilise the whipped egg white.

The step that matters

Beating the icing until thick and smooth. Egg white only holds its foam when it is whipped to a firm froth before sugar is added. Over-beating can make it dry and grainy, while under-beating leaves a runny icing that will not set on the pears.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, lemon. 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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