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To Stew Pears

A simple dish of pears stewed with sugar and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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To Stew Pears

Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Stew Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and halve the pears.

Stew and sweeten

  1. Place them in a stew pan with very little water.

  2. Stew until tender.

  3. Add ½ cup of sugar and continue to stew until the syrup is rich.

  4. Boil the lemon with the pears, then slice it and add it when the sugar is added to improve color and flavor.

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

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

  2. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Soften as they stew, forming the tender body of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the pears and thickens into a rich syrup as the liquid reduces.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma and helps improve the color and flavor of the pears.

The step that matters

Stewing the sugar into the syrup. Sugar dissolves into the cooking liquid and concentrates as water evaporates, so the syrup thickens only with enough gentle stewing. With very little water, the pears can scorch if the pan runs dry, so check the liquid while it reduces.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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