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Dessert

Preserved Pears

Preserved pears are pears stewed in sugar syrup until the fruit is coated and the syrup thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the pears.

  2. In a pot, cover the pear cores and skins with water and boil.

  3. Strain the liquid and add the sugar; let it boil.

Cook and preserve

  1. Add the prepared fruit and stew gently until the syrup is colored.

  2. Can and seal immediately.

  3. Bottle any remaining syrup for pudding sauce.

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

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

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 is cooked and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Water
Extracts flavor from the cores and skins to make the syrup.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the syrup is colored. Gentle heat lets the fruit soften and color the syrup slowly without breaking the pieces apart or scorching the sugar. Vigorous boiling can turn the sugar syrup dark and bitter and make the fruit fall apart.

“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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