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Pear Pickles

A pickled pear dish made with sugar, vinegar, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Pear Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tie the cloves, allspice, and cinnamon in small bags.

Cook

  1. Combine sugar and vinegar in a pot with the spice bags.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim off any foam.

  3. Add the pears and cook until 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 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 + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the bulk of the fruit, becoming tender as they cook in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the pickle and helps preserve it by drawing moisture out of the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve it.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Contributes sweet, warm aroma and flavour to the syrup.

The step that matters

Add the pears and cook until tender. Cooking the pears in the hot syrup softens them evenly. Overcooking can break them down into mush, while undercooking leaves them firm and less absorbent of the flavours.

Swap the pear

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

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

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