Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A sweet preserve made by boiling pears, removing skins, sieving pulp, and cooking with powdered sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Marmalade

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Boil the pears in water for 20 minutes until soft.

  2. Drain and remove the skins by rubbing with a damp towel.

  3. Press the pulp through a sieve and weigh it.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Add an equal weight of powdered sugar that has been heated in the oven.

  2. Stir until it boils.

  3. Reduce heat to simmer for about 20 minutes, avoiding boiling.

Pot and store

  1. When thick, pot the marmalade and cover once cool.

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 pulp that forms the body of the marmalade.
Powdered loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it dissolves and reduces, helps the marmalade thicken and keep.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Once the sugar is added, a rolling boil can scorch the sugar and darken the flavour. A gentle simmer lets water evaporate slowly so the mixture thickens evenly.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes