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Dessert

Stewed Pears

Stewed Pears are pears cooked slowly with lemon rind, sugar, and water, optionally colored with cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stewed Pears

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pare, cut in halves, and core the pears.

  2. Place the pears in a stewpan with lemon rind, sugar, and enough water to nearly cover them.

  3. If desired, add cochineal tied in muslin for color.

  4. Stew the fruit gently for 4 to 6 hours, or longer if not tender.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Form the body of the dish, softening into tender fruit during long gentle stewing.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and syrup while helping preserve its shape during slow cooking.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic flavor that balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Stew the fruit gently for 4 to 6 hours, or longer if not tender. Low, slow heat lets pear tissue soften evenly without breaking apart. Boiling hard can split the fruit and cloud the syrup, so the pears should simmer only gently until a knife passes through easily.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar. 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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