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Canned Pears

Pears are canned in a sugar‑water syrup with lemon and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Canned Pears

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Canned Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the syrup by mixing sugar and water.

  2. If using common cooking-pears, add the juice of 1 lemon and a piece of ginger root to the syrup.

  3. Peel and core the pears, then pack them into jars.

Pack and process

  1. Pour the syrup over the pears, ensuring they are fully covered.

  2. Seal the jars and process them in a water bath for preservation.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  5. Ginger + syruptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together950 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 during cooking and forms the body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps keep the fruit's texture and flavour in the jar.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps slow browning of the fruit.
Ginger root
Adds a warm, spicy aroma to the syrup and the pears.

The step that matters

Keep the pears fully covered with syrup. Fruit exposed to air can discolour and spoil, and submerging it in syrup limits contact with oxygen and microbes before the jars are sealed and processed.

Swap the pear

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, ginger, syrup, 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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