Name: Iron Pear Preserve
Ingredients: Pears (with stems); Water; ¾ pound sugar for every pound of pears

Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Iron Pear Preserve

Ingredients

Pears (with stems)
Water
¾ pound sugar for every pound of pears

Directions

Prepare the pears

Pare the pears, leaving the stems on, and weigh them.
Boil the pears in a little water until they are soft, then drain them in a sieve.

Make the syrup and finish

In the same water, add ¾ pound of sugar for every pound of pears and boil to create a syrup.
Add the pears to the syrup and boil for half an hour.

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.

Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pears: Form the fruit of the preserve, softening as they cook and absorbing the syrup.
Sugar: Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled into syrup, thickens it and helps preserve the fruit.

“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.