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Dessert

Pears, Jargonelle

Pears preserved in a spiced syrup, simmered until clear and then dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Pears, Jargonelle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the pears very thin and smooth.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil them gently in a thin syrup made with sugar and water.

  2. Let the pears sit in the syrup for one to two days.

  3. Add more sugar to the syrup and boil the pears again.

  4. Repeat this process until the pears are clear.

  5. Dry the pears on a sieve in the sun or a warm place.

  6. For garnish, boil thinly pared orange and lemon peels in the syrup.

  7. Combine all the syrups together.

Finish and preserve

  1. If preserving whole, gather pears before they are fully ripe.

  2. Simmer the pears in syrup until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. For added flavor, you can include lemon.

  4. If preserving in brandy, prick the pears and boil gently 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Firm fruit that softens and turns tender and clear as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as the syrup thickens, draws water out to preserve the pears.

The step that matters

Repeating the syrup boil with more sugar. Raising the sugar concentration gradually lets the syrup slowly replace the water in the pear tissue. Boiling too hard or adding too much sugar at once can shrink or toughen the fruit and stop it from becoming clear.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pearthe original

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