Skip to main content
Dessert

Ginger Pears

A preserve of pears flavored with ginger, lemon, and orange, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ginger Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the ginger into thin slices.

  2. Press the juice from the lemons and oranges.

Make the preserve

  1. Add enough hot water to dissolve the sugar.

  2. When hot, add the lemon juice, orange juice, ginger, lemon rind, and orange peel.

  3. Finally, add the sliced pears and cook slowly for 3 hours.

Jar and store

  1. Place in pint fruit jars and seal.

  2. Store in a cool, dry place.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

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

  5. Pear + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Form the bulk of the preserve and soften into tender fruit during long slow cooking.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps set it into a thick, spreadable texture.
Preserved ginger
Adds spicy aroma and a chewy, bright flavour throughout the preserve.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 3 hours after adding the pears. Long, gentle cooking lets the pears soften and absorb the sugar while the liquid reduces and thickens. Cooking too fast can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pot or leave the fruit firm and uneven.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, lemon, sugar, orange. 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.

More ginger pears recipes

Preserved 4 See all 31 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes