Name: Pear Preserves
Ingredients: 1 pound pears; 1 pound sugar

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 ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

1 pound pears
1 pound sugar

Directions

Prepare

Scald the pears until tender.
Boil the sugar with water to make a syrup.

Combine and seal

Add the tender pears to the syrup.
Seal the mixture securely in jars.

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.

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

Pears: Provide the fruit body and flavor that the preserve is built around.
Sugar: Sweetens the preserve and helps preserve it by binding water in the syrup.

“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.