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Dessert

Baked Pears

A baked pear dish with butter, sugar, lemon, water, and claret wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Baked Pears

Why it works: Pear and wine work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 223 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Baked Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Wipe and core the pears, then fill them with butter and sugar.

  2. Place the pears in a baking dish, sprinkle with sugar, and add a few slices of lemon.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour 1 cup of boiling water around the pears and cover the dish.

  2. Cook slowly until the pears are almost tender.

  3. Pour 1 cup of Claret wine over the pears and bake until tender, basting occasionally.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Hold their shape as the main body of the dish while softening into tender fruit.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture inside the cored pears as it melts during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pears brown and caramelize slightly in the baking juices.
Claret wine
Adds acidity and aroma and flavors the syrupy juices that form around the pears.

The step that matters

Cooking slowly until almost tender. Pears can turn mushy if baked too hot or too long. Gentle, covered cooking softens them evenly while they keep their shape, and adding the wine later keeps its flavor from cooking off entirely.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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