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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made from pears and dried apricots, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 218 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the pears and boil them until soft.

  2. Once cooled, run the pears through a sieve.

  3. Prepare the dried apricots in the same way.

Make the marmalade

  1. Mix the pear puree with the apricot pulp.

  2. Add half the amount of sugar as the total fruit mixture.

  3. Cook slowly, stirring constantly, until the desired thickness is reached.

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 + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet tasteless pears
Provide the main bulk and soft, smooth body of the spread.
Dried apricot pulp
Adds fruity flavour and body to the spread.
Sugar
Sweetens the spread and helps it thicken as the mixture cooks down.

The step that matters

Cook slowly, stirring constantly. As water evaporates, the sugar and fruit concentrate and can scorch or stick to the base of the pan. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and prevents burning, while the mixture slowly thickens to the desired consistency.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

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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