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Dessert

Preserved Pears

Preserved pears are pears stewed in a clarified sugar syrup, optionally flavored with clove or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the pears thinly and remove any blemishes.

  2. If using large pears, cut them into halves or slices for quicker cooking.

  3. If the pears are hard, parboil them until tender before adding to the syrup.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine 1 cup of water and 1 pound of sugar to make a syrup.

  2. Boil the syrup until clarified, then skim off any foam.

Cook the pears

  1. Add the pears to the syrup and stew gently until they are clear.

  2. For extra flavor, stick a clove in the blossom end of each pear or add lemon juice and rind for every five pounds of fruit.

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 + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  5. 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 softens and turns clear as it stews in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the pears are clear. Boiling hard can break the fruit apart and make the syrup cloudy, while gentle heat lets sugar slowly penetrate the pear so it becomes translucent and holds its shape.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, 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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