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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A preserved pear dish made by boiling pears in sugar syrup and clarifying with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Peel the pears and drop them in cold water.

  2. In a pot, combine the sugar and enough water to just cover it.

  3. Boil the sugar mixture for a while.

  4. Beat the egg white and add it to the syrup to clarify.

  5. Skim the syrup, then add the pears.

Cook and jar

  1. Cook until the pears are a pretty red and the syrup thickens.

  2. Transfer to jars and seal tightly.

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).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pear + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 syrup surrounds and preserves.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out water.
Egg white
Binds impurities to the syrup so they can be skimmed off, clarifying it.

The step that matters

Skim the syrup, then add the pears. Clarifying with egg white only works if the impurities that rise are fully skimmed off before the fruit goes in; leftover residue clouds the syrup and can spoil the appearance of the preserves.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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