Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Compote

A cooked pear compote made with pears, sugar, lemon, gelatine, and pear water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Compote

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Pare and quarter the pears.

  2. Cook the pears in a covered kettle with a small amount of water.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a hot syrup by combining sugar, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  2. Add the cooked pears to the syrup.

  3. Cook for a few minutes.

Set in a mold

  1. Transfer the mixture to a mold dipped in cold water.

  2. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water.

  3. Add the dissolved gelatine to the syrup.

  4. Boil for 1 minute.

  5. Strain the syrup over the fruit.

Serve

  1. Once cold, turn the compote into a dish.

  2. Serve with whipped cream around the base.

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 body and flavour of the compote.
Gelatine
Sets the syrup and fruit into a firm, sliceable shape as it cools.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and gives it body as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup and balances the fruit.

The step that matters

Add the gelatine and boil only briefly. Gelatine must be fully dissolved before it goes into the syrup, and prolonged boiling weakens its setting power, so the compote may fail to firm up if it is boiled too long.

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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes