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Dessert

Ginger Pears

A preserve of pears flavored with ginger, lemon, and orange, simmered for hours and stored in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Ginger Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the ginger into thin slices.

  2. Press the juice from the lemons and oranges, and shred their rind.

  3. Peel the pears and slice them crosswise.

Cook

  1. Add enough hot water to dissolve the sugar.

  2. Once hot, add the lemon and orange juice, ginger, lemon rind, and orange peel.

  3. Finally, add the pears and cook slowly for 3 hours.

Jar and store

  1. Place in pint fruit jars and seal.

  2. Store in a cool, dry place.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Form the bulk of the preserve and soften into tender pieces during slow cooking.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks down.
Preserved ginger
Adds spicy aroma and a chewy texture to the fruit.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavor and supports setting and preservation.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 3 hours after adding the pears. Slow cooking softens the pears evenly and lets the sugar concentrate into a thick syrup. Cooking too fast risks scorching the sugar on the bottom of the pot before the fruit is tender.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Pearthe original

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