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Dessert

Preserved Pears

Pears preserved in a sugar syrup, optionally flavored with ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pint of water and 1 1/2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Cook the sliced pears in the syrup for 2 to 3 hours until golden brown.

  3. If desired, add a little preserved ginger during cooking.

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. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 softens and turns golden as it cooks slowly in the syrup.
Sugar
Makes the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Cook the pears slowly in the syrup. Long, gentle cooking lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, so the slices turn tender and translucent. Cooking too hard can break the slices apart or scorch the sugar before the pears are evenly cooked.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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