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Dessert

Fear-jam

A preserve made by cooking pears with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Fear-jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel, quarter, and core the pears.

  2. Weigh the pears and pack them closely into an earthen jar.

  3. Place the jar in a saucepan of boiling water and let it remain until the fruit is soft.

Make the syrup

  1. In a separate pot, combine an equal weight of sugar with 1 pint of water for each pound of sugar.

  2. Heat the sugar mixture and skim until it forms a clear syrup.

Cook and store

  1. Add the pears to the syrup and stir frequently until it boils.

  2. Once boiling, stir constantly and boil for 20 minutes.

  3. Partly cool the jam and then store it as directed.

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

Perfectly ripe pears
Provide the fruit, flavor and pectin-bearing body that gives the jam its texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks down.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that the pears cook in.

The step that matters

Boil the jam constantly for 20 minutes. Stirring constantly keeps the fruit from scorching on the bottom of the pot. Sustained boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar so the jam sets properly.

“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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