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Dessert

Fears, Baked

Pears halved or quartered, then baked whole in a covered jar with lemon, cloves, allspice, sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fears, Baked

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and halve the pears, or quarter them if large, leaving the stalks on and removing the cores.

  2. Place the pears in a clean baking jar with a tightly fitting lid.

Add the flavourings

  1. Add the lemon rind cut into strips, juice of ½ lemon, cloves, pounded allspice, and enough water to cover the pears.

  2. Add the sugar.

Bake

  1. Cover the jar tightly and place it in a very cool oven.

  2. Bake the pears for 5 to 6 hours, ensuring the oven is not too hot.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pear + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  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
Form the dish's main body, softening slowly into a tender, spoonable fruit.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the pears and helps form a syrup that flavours and preserves the fruit.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup and helps keep the pear flesh pale.

The step that matters

Keep the oven very cool. A slow, gentle heat softens the pears evenly and turns the syrup richly flavoured without breaking the fruit apart or scorching the sugar. A hot oven would boil the liquid hard and cook the pears unevenly.

Swap the pear

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, clove, allspice, 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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