Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Preserve

A preserve made by cooking pears with sugar and optional cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Preserve

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Pare and cut pears in halves, core them, and weigh them.

  2. If pears are hard, boil them in water until tender.

Make the syrup

  1. For syrup, boil sugar with water for a few moments.

  2. Skim the syrup and cool it until lukewarm.

Cook and store

  1. Add pears to the syrup and boil gently until the syrup penetrates and the pears look clear.

  2. Remove pieces that cook before the others.

  3. Once done, take out the pears, boil down the syrup a little, and pour it over the pears.

  4. Add cloves for flavor if desired.

  5. Store the preserve in jars with glass or tin tops, sealing with putty or plaster of Paris.

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

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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 becomes tender and clear as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as it thickens into syrup, helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boil gently in the syrup until the pears look clear. Boiling too hard can break the pears apart and make the syrup cloudy. Gentle heat lets sugar slowly penetrate the fruit, 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):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Clove CakeClove Cake53 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes