Skip to main content
Dessert

Spiced Pears

A preserved pear dish cooked in a spiced vinegar and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and halve the tart pears.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine vinegar, sugar, mace, allspice, cinnamon, and cloves in a pot to make a syrup.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil, then reduce heat and let it simmer.

Cook the pears

  1. Add the pears to the syrup and cook slowly for about 3 hours.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + peartop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the pears while they cook.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.
Tart pears
Provide the fruit that softens and absorbs the spiced syrup as it cooks.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic flavor to the syrup.
Whole mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Keep the syrup at a gentle simmer. Cooking slowly keeps the pears tender and intact, while a hard boil can break them apart and make the syrup reduce too fast or turn sugary and uneven.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, allspice, cinnamon, clove, pear. 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

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes