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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made from pears, their peelings, and cores boiled with sugar to form a jelly-like marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel, quarter, and core the pears, then weigh them.

  2. Place the pears in a preserving kettle and cover with cold water.

  3. Heat slowly and boil gently until tender.

  4. Remove the pears.

  5. Add the peelings and cores to the kettle, boiling them for an hour.

  6. Strain the water from the peelings and cores.

Make the marmalade

  1. For each pound of fruit, use 1 pint of the strained water and 1 pound of sugar.

  2. In the preserving kettle, combine the sugar and water, boiling to create a syrup while skimming off any scum.

  3. Test the syrup by cooling a small amount on a saucer; it should jelly slightly.

  4. Stir the pears into the syrup and boil the marmalade for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  5. Partly cool the marmalade and then store it as directed.

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

Ripe pears
Provide the fruit that forms the body and flavor of the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a jelly-like texture.
Cold water
Extracts pectin from the peelings and cores, and dissolves the sugar into syrup.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup for jelly set. Pectin and sugar set only at the right concentration. Cooling a small sample on a saucer shows whether the syrup will jelly before the pears are added, preventing a runny or overly stiff marmalade.

“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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