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Dessert

Pears, Jargonelle

Pears preserved in a sweet syrup with orange and lemon peels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 the pears

  1. Peel the pears very thin and smooth.

  2. Boil the pears gently in a thin syrup made with sugar.

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

Build the syrup

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

  2. Repeat this process daily until the pears are clear.

  3. Boil thinly peeled orange and lemon peels in the same syrup.

Dry, store and serve

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

  2. Store any pears not used for drying in the syrup.

  3. Combine all the syrups together and use the peels as a garnish when serving.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  5. 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
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and translucent as it cooks slowly in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, preserves it by drawing out water.
Orange peels
Add aromatic citrus oils and a bitter edge that flavours the syrup.
Lemon peels
Add bright acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Repeat the daily syrup boiling until the pears are clear. Each boil with more sugar gradually replaces water inside the fruit with sugar. Rushing this step leaves the pears opaque and less preserved.

Swap the pear

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

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

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