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Dessert

Spiced Pears

A preserved pear dish flavored with cloves, mace, cinnamon, and vinegar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Spiced Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare small muslin bags.

  2. Divide the spices into four parts and place each part in a bag.

  3. Fill a bowl with cold water and add a little vinegar to the water.

  4. Peel the pears, keeping them whole, and drop them into the cold water to preserve their color.

Cook the pears

  1. Boil the sugar and vinegar until they form a syrup.

  2. Add the spice bags to the syrup.

  3. Drop as many pears as can fit into the syrup without crowding.

  4. Boil gently until a straw can penetrate the pears easily.

  5. Remove the pears from the syrup.

  6. Place the pears in a stone jar.

  7. Repeat the process with the remaining pears.

Finish and store

  1. Boil the syrup alone for 20 minutes.

  2. Pour the syrup over the pears.

  3. Place the spice bags on top of the pears.

  4. Cover the jar tightly once cooled.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pear + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Sickle pears
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and absorbs the sweet spiced syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
White vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the pears.
Mixed cloves, mace, and cinnamon
Flavor the syrup and pears with warm aromatic spice.

The step that matters

Boil gently until a straw can penetrate the pears easily. Boiling too hard can break the pears apart, while undercooking leaves them firm. Gentle simmering softens the fruit evenly so it stays whole and holds its shape.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

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