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Pickles. Pear

Sweet pickled pears made by boiling pears in a vinegar-sugar syrup with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Pickles. Pear

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel, halve, and core the pears.

  2. In a pot, combine vinegar and sugar; bring to a boil.

  3. Pour the hot mixture over the pears and let stand overnight.

Cook and finish

  1. Add spices in a bag and cook slowly until the fruit is easily pierced with a fork.

  2. Remove the fruit and boil the syrup down until thick.

  3. Pour the thick syrup over the fruit to make sweet pickles.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard pears
Provide the fruit that softens during cooking and absorbs the sweet, sour syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickling liquid its sharp flavour and helps preserve the fruit.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, as it thickens, helps create the final sweet pickle texture.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma to the syrup and fruit.
Cloves
Adds warm, pungent aroma to the syrup and fruit.
Allspice
Adds warm, mixed-spice aroma to the syrup and fruit.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup down until thick. Boiling concentrates the sugar and vinegar, so the syrup thickens and coats the fruit. If it is under-reduced, the pickles stay thin and watery; over-reduction can make them overly sticky or syrupy.

Swap the pear

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

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

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