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
Directions
Prepare
Place the quartered pears in a preserving pan.
Sprinkle the crushed sugar over the pears.
Let them sit overnight.
Cook and store
Add the water.
Cook for 5 hours.
Transfer the mixture to stone jars.
Cover the jars.
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.
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Bartlett pear + sugartop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together83 recipes
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Pears
- Supply the fruit flesh and flavor that the sugar and cooking preserve.
- Sugar
- Draws juice out of the fruit, forms a syrup, and sweetens while inhibiting spoilage microbes.
The step that matters
Letting the sugar sit overnight. Sugar drawn over the pears dissolves into their released juice, forming a concentrated syrup before heating. This osmotic pull softens the fruit and helps the syrup coat and protect it during the long cook.
“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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