Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Preserves

A preserved pear dish made by boiling pears, adding sugar, and cooking until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Parboil the pears

  1. Parboil the pears in just enough water to cover them.

  2. Once done, place the pears on a plate.

Make the preserves

  1. Measure the same weight of sugar as the pears before boiling.

  2. Add the sugar to the water used for boiling the pears.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Drop in the pears and cook until they are soft enough to hold their shape.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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 the preserve, with their texture determining the final bite.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it dissolves and thickens the liquid, helps the preserve keep and set.

The step that matters

Cooking the pears in the sugar syrup until just tender. Pears hold their shape only when cooked gently until tender. Overcooking breaks down the cell walls and fruit pectin, so the pears turn mushy instead of staying whole.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes