Skip to main content

Preserving Pears and Apples

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Preserving Pears and Apples

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place apples and pears in glazed earthen vessels, each holding about 1 gallon.

  2. Surround each fruit with paper.

  3. Stack the vessels to save space.

  4. Mix 2 parts skimmed milk curd with 1 part lime to create a cement.

  5. Seal the spaces between the vessels with the cement to exclude air.

  6. Store in a dry, cold place with stable temperature.

  7. Remove pears from vessels 10 days before use and keep in a warm room to enhance ripening.

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. Apple + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Pear + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together300 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pear + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together52 recipes

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

  5. Apple + limetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Swap the lime

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

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, pear, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes