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Dessert

Baked Pears

Pears baked with brown sugar and water, served with sweet cream or boiled custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Baked Pears

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Baked Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and core the pears without dividing them.

  2. Place the pears in a pan and fill the centers with brown sugar.

  3. Add a little water to the pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake the pears until perfectly tender.

  2. Serve with sweet cream or boiled custard.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Pear + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Soften as they bake, becoming tender while holding their shape in the pan.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and melts into a syrup that flavors the pears.

The step that matters

Bake until perfectly tender. Pears differ in ripeness, and the heat must soften the dense flesh all the way to the core. Underbaked pears stay firm and gritty, while overbaked pears collapse.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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