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Stewed Pears

Stewed pears are cooked in a sweet syrup with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stewed Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, quarter, and core the pears, then drop them into cold water to prevent discoloration.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine 2 cups of water and ½ cup of sugar to make a syrup, then boil for a few minutes.

  2. Add the lemon slices to the syrup while boiling for extra flavor, then remove them before adding the pears.

Cook the pears

  1. Carefully add the pears to the syrup and cook until they are clear and tender, being careful not to stir too much to avoid breaking the fruit.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 softens and turns tender while cooking in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the pears take on a glossy, tender texture.

The step that matters

Adding the pears and cooking gently. Pears can break apart if stirred vigorously while they soften. Gentle handling keeps the pieces intact, and cooking until tender rather than rushing ensures the fruit is evenly cooked through the syrup.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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.

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