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Dessert

Baked Pears

A baked pear dish topped with meringue and pine nuts.

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 vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 334 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Baked Pears

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pears

  1. Select ripe, mellow pears of similar size.

  2. Wash and remove the cores with a sharp knife from the bottom end.

  3. Place pears in a pie tin with a little water.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until very tender, 1 to 3 hours.

  2. Once baked, set pears upright and fill the cavity with a meringue made from egg white, sugar, and vanilla.

  3. Top the meringue with pine nuts and return to the oven for 2-3 minutes to set the egg.

  4. Serve hot or cold.

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 + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together334 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Vanilla + pinetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  5. Pine + nutstop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Soften slowly during baking and provide the main body and sweet flavour of the dish.
Egg white
Whips into the meringue that fills the cavity and sets to a light, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the meringue and helps it hold its structure when whipped.
Vanilla extract
Adds aroma to the meringue filling.

The step that matters

Returning the filled pears to the oven. Egg white sets with gentle heat, and overbaking can make the meringue weep, toughen or brown too much. Watch it closely for only the short time given.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, egg, sugar, vanilla, pine. 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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