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Dessert

Compote of Pears

A compote of pears cooked with water, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, lemon peel, and colored with cochineal, served with whipped cream.

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 ↓

Compote of Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and core the pears.

Cook the pears

  1. Place the pears in a saucepan with water, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and lemon peel.

  2. Boil until the pears are tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the syrup and color it red with cochineal.

  2. Return the pears to the syrup and let them cool.

  3. Serve in a glass dish topped with a little whipped cream.

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

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  4. Pear + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooking pears
Provide the main fruit, which softens and turns tender as it simmers in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and thickens the syrup as it cooks down.
Cochineal
Adds a red color to the syrup, which is visual only and does not change flavor.

The step that matters

Boil until the pears are tender. Boiling too briefly leaves the pears firm and raw-tasting, while overcooking breaks them down. Checking for tenderness with a knife or skewer shows when they are ready.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, clove, cinnamon, cream. 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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