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Dessert

To Preserve Pears

This recipe preserves pears in a sugar syrup, cooling and reboiling them for storage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

To Preserve Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Combine 1 pound of pears with ¾ pound of sugar.

  2. Pour boiling water over the pears.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 20 minutes.

  4. Add the pears to the syrup.

  5. Cook for about 20 minutes.

Cook in stages

  1. Remove the pears.

  2. Place the pears on a large dish to cool in the sun.

  3. Once the pears are cold, return them to the syrup.

  4. Boil the mixture until the syrup is transparent.

  5. Remove the pears again.

  6. Set the pears in the sun.

  7. Boil the syrup until it thickens.

  8. Return the pears to the syrup.

  9. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Store

  1. Transfer the pears into jars for storage.

  2. Optionally flavor with ginger or cinnamon.

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 that becomes tender and holds its shape in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as syrup, draws out moisture and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it thickens. Sugar must reach a high enough concentration in the syrup to preserve the fruit. Repeated cooling in the sun and reboiling lets the syrup thicken gradually while the pears keep their shape.

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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