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Stewed Pears

A sweet dish of pears stewed in water, lemon peel, and sugar, optionally colored with cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stewed Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the pears and place them in a stewpan.

  2. Add water, lemon peel, and sugar (¼ cup for every pound of pears).

  3. If desired, add a few drops of cochineal for color.

Stew and thicken

  1. Simmer gently until the pears are cooked.

  2. Remove the pears and continue simmering the syrup until it thickens.

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

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

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

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Main fruit that softens during gentle simmering to become tender.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps it thicken as the liquid reduces.
Water
Forms the poaching liquid that cooks the pears and becomes the syrup.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the pears are cooked. Gentle heat softens the pears evenly without breaking them apart. A hard boil can crack the fruit and make the syrup cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar. 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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