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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A preserve made by cooking pears with sugar and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the pears.

  2. In a pot, combine the pears and sugar.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook until the sugar dissolves.

Make the preserves

  1. Remove the pears and place them in the sun to dry.

  2. Add race ginger or cloves to the syrup if desired.

  3. Return the pears to the boiling syrup and cook until tender.

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 + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 base and bulk, softening into tender pieces in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and, once dissolved, forms the syrup that thickens and preserves the fruit.

The step that matters

Return the pears to the boiling syrup and cook until tender. Pears need enough time in the hot syrup for the cell walls to soften and the sugar to penetrate. Stopping early leaves firm, under-infused pieces, while overcooking can make them mushy and break them apart.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

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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