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Dessert

Pears Done Whole

Whole pears cooked in a cinnamon sugar syrup and served in a compote dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 600 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Pears Done Whole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Grill pears over a strong charcoal fire until the skins come off.

  2. Wash pears thoroughly in several waters until clean.

Poach in syrup

  1. Place pears in a weak syrup made with sugar and water, adding cinnamon.

  2. Boil gently until pears are tender.

  3. For early pears, insert a clove into each pear and blanch until soft.

Pare and finish

  1. Pare and refresh pears in water mixed with lemon juice to maintain color.

  2. Place pears in ½ cup of syrup and boil with some lemon juice until they swim in the syrup.

Serve

  1. Serve in a compote dish.

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

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
The fruit that softens into tender pieces as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup the pears cook in and gives it body.
Cinnamon
Adds a warm, spiced aroma to the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that slows browning of the cut pear flesh.

The step that matters

Pare and refresh pears in acidulated water. Cut pear flesh oxidizes quickly and turns brown when exposed to air. Lemon juice's acidity slows this enzymatic browning, so the pears stay pale while they wait to be cooked.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, 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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