Skip to main content
Dessert

Pears Stewed with Wine

Pears stewed with red wine and sugar until tender, served with the syrup.

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

Why it works: Pear and red wine work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Pears Stewed with Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Peel the pears and leave them whole.

  2. Stew the pears in a saucepan until they are half cooked.

  3. Add the red wine and continue cooking over low heat.

Serve

  1. Once the pears are thoroughly cooked, arrange them in a serving dish.

  2. Stew down the syrup and pour it hot over the pears.

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 + red winetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

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

  3. Red wine + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together864 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Their flesh softens and turns tender as they cook, becoming the main body of the dish.
Red wine
Adds acidity and aroma, and as it reduces it forms a flavourful syrup that coats the pears.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the acidity of the wine, and helps the syrup thicken as it reduces.

The step that matters

Stew the syrup down before pouring. Reducing the wine concentrates its flavour and sugars and thickens the liquid. If the syrup is too thin it will taste weak and run off the pears instead of clinging to them.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Pearthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Applefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, 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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes