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Dessert

Whole Pears Pickled

Whole pears are boiled, then pickled in a sweet vinegar syrup with cinnamon, cloves, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Whole Pears Pickled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel the pears and cut out the ends, leaving the stems intact.

  2. Place the pears in a preserving kettle with 1 quart of water and boil until easily pierced with a fork.

  3. Lay the pears out on a dish.

Make the syrup

  1. In the same kettle, add 1½ pounds of sugar, 1 pint of vinegar, a stick of cinnamon, whole cloves, and fresh ginger.

  2. Boil the mixture for five minutes and skim off any foam.

  3. Return the pears to the kettle and boil until the syrup thickens.

Jar and finish

  1. Remove the pears and place them in jars.

  2. Boil the syrup for five more minutes and pour it over the pears in the jars.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 boiling liquid and becomes the main body of the preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the syrup as it boils down.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the pears.
Fresh ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic pungency that flavors the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the pears until easily pierced. Pears must be fully tender before the syrup is added, because the fruit will not soften further once it is preserved in the acidic, sugary syrup. Testing with a fork confirms they are cooked through.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Quincefits about as well
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, 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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