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Dessert

Pear Dessert

A dessert of pears filled with pecan nuts, served with steamed rice and warm syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pear Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare 1 cup of steamed rice and set aside.

  2. Halve 4 pears and remove the cores.

  3. In a saucepan, combine 1 cup of syrup, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon of ginger. Heat until warm.

  4. Place a pecan nut in each pear half.

Assemble and serve

  1. Surround the steamed rice with the pear halves and pour the syrup over the rice.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Rice + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,196 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the fruit base and a soft, sweet texture when cooked.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and moisture, coating the rice and pears.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the syrup and fruit.
Ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor.
Steamed rice
Forms the base that absorbs the warm syrup.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, pear, syrup, lemon, ginger):

  1. Sesamefits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, pear, syrup, lemon, ginger. 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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