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Dessert

Sweet Pear Pickle

A sweet pickle made by cooking pears in vinegar, brown sugar, cinnamon, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pear Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, brown sugar, cinnamon sticks, and cloves tied in small bags.

  2. Boil until a good syrup forms.

Cook the pears

  1. Add the pears to the syrup.

  2. Cover the pot and cook very slowly on the back of the stove until the pears can be pierced with a straw.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + peartop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Clove + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Vinegar
Provides the acidity that sharpens the sweet syrup and helps preserve the pears.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the syrup and thickens it as it cooks down, giving the pickle its body.
Cinnamon sticks
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Cloves
Adds pungent, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Bartlett or sickle pears
Form the main body of the pickle, absorbing the spiced syrup as they cook.

The step that matters

Cooking the pears very slowly. Gentle, low heat lets the pears soften through and absorb the syrup without breaking apart or turning mushy. Boiling hard would tear the fruit and make the syrup cloudy.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, clove. 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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