Name: Preserved Pears
Ingredients: ½ bushel Bartlett pears; 8 pounds crushed sugar; 3 quarts water

Why it works: Bartlett pear and sugar work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 83 recipes. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

½ bushel Bartlett pears
8 pounds crushed sugar
3 quarts water

Directions

Prepare

Peel and cut the pears into quarters.
Place the pears in a preserving pan and cover them with crushed sugar.
Allow the mixture to sit overnight.

Cook and store

In the morning, add water and cook for five hours.
Transfer the pears to stone jars and cover.

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.

Bartlett pear + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together83 recipes

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 softens and becomes the preserve.
Crushed sugar: Draws moisture out of the fruit and sweetens it, helping preserve it.
Water: Loosens the syrup so the pears cook evenly.

“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.