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 ↓
Preserved Pears
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Peel the pears and cut each large pear into four pieces, removing the core.
For every pound of fruit, weigh out a pound of sugar.
Make the syrup
Dissolve the sugar with just enough water to wet it.
Dissolve the isinglass in warm water and add it to the sugar syrup.
Cook the fruit
Cook the fruit in the syrup until it is clear.
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.
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Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Main fruit, which softens and becomes translucent as it cooks in the syrup.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it.
- Isinglass
- Gelling agent that helps the syrup set as it cools.
The step that matters
Cook the fruit in the syrup until it is clear. Sugar must penetrate the fruit gradually. Cooking too hard or too long breaks the pieces down, while stopping too early leaves the fruit opaque and less preserved.
“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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