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Spiced Seckel Pears

Spiced Seckel Pears are pears cooked in a syrup of sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Seckel Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Divide spices into 4 parts and tie each part in a square of muslin.

  2. Pears can be peeled or left whole as desired.

  3. For larger pears, cut them in halves lengthwise, removing the cores but leaving the stem on one half.

Make the syrup and cook the pears

  1. Add spices to sugar and vinegar, then bring to a boil.

  2. Add pears to syrup and cook until they can be pierced with a straw.

  3. Remove fruit and pack it in a crock.

  4. Bring syrup to a boil again and pour over the fruit.

  5. Keep the jar covered.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 in the syrup and becomes tender and flavored.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the syrup its tang and helps preserve the fruit.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aromatic flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook pears until they can be pierced with a straw. Cooking until tender but not collapsed lets syrup penetrate the fruit evenly. Undercooked pears stay firm and under-flavored, while overcooking makes them mushy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, clove, sugar, allspice, vinegar, cinnamon, ginger):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, clove, sugar, allspice, vinegar, cinnamon, ginger. 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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