Name: Alligator Pear Cocktail
Ingredients: 1 ripe but firm pear; cocktail catsup to taste; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; ice water as needed; chopped ice

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 ↓

Alligator Pear Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the pulp of the pear into dice.
Season with cocktail catsup, lemon juice, and salt.
Add a little ice water and bits of chopped ice.
Serve in small cups or glasses.

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.

Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together942 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pear: Provides the main body and texture of the cocktail, as diced fruit pulp.
Cocktail catsup: Adds sweetness, tang and savoury colour that flavour the diced pear.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness of the catsup.
Chopped ice: Chills the cocktail so it is served cold without being diluted by large cubes.

“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.