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Preserve

To Preserve Pears

Whole pears peeled and simmered in sugar syrup with lemon, then jarred and preserved in the syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

To Preserve Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Select large, juicy pears that are not perfectly ripe.

  2. Peel them smoothly and thinly, leaving the stems intact and removing the black top at the blossom end. Place the pears in a pan of cold water as you work.

  3. In a pot, combine 1 quart of water with 1 pound of loaf sugar to make a thin syrup. Simmer the pears in this syrup for about 30 minutes.

  4. Transfer the pears to a tureen and let them soak in the syrup for 2 days, ensuring they are fully covered.

Make the strong syrup

  1. After 2 days, drain the syrup and add 1 pound of sugar for each pint of syrup.

  2. Stir in a small amount of beaten egg white and some thinly pared fresh lemon peel.

  3. Heat the syrup over a brisk fire and boil for 10 minutes, skimming off any foam.

  4. Add enough lemon juice to flavor the syrup, then return the pears to the pot.

  5. Simmer the pears in the strong syrup until they become transparent.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove them and spread them out to cool, inserting a clove into the blossom end of each pear.

  2. Place the pears in glass jars and keep the syrup warm.

  3. Pour the syrup over the pears.

  4. If you want them to be red, add a little powdered cochineal to the syrup when adding the pears.

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. Lemon + clovetop 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 itself; their firm, not-quite-ripe flesh holds its shape through long simmering.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, at high concentration, preserves the fruit and makes it glossy.
Egg white
When beaten into the hot syrup and skimmed, it collects impurities so the syrup stays clear.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the syrup's flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Simmering the pears until transparent in the strong syrup. Simmering too hard or too briefly changes the result: gentle heat lets sugar slowly replace water in the fruit, so pears turn translucent without breaking apart.

Swap the clove

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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