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Dessert

Ice of Pears

A chilled pear dessert made by boiling pears, sweetening, sieving, adding lemon juice, and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Ice of Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Peel and cut the pears into pieces.

  2. Place the pears in a pot with enough water to cover them.

  3. Cook over heat until the pears soften.

Sieve and chill

  1. Add sugar to taste and rub the mixture through a sieve using a spatula.

  2. Stir in the juice of two lemons.

  3. Chill the mixture in ice.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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
Provide the main fruit flavor and the bulk of the pureed body of the ice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the frozen ice by lowering its freezing point.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pear flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cook the pears until fully soft. Pears that are not cooked through stay firm and fibrous, so the sieved purée will be grainy and harder to pass through the sieve. Cooking until they fall apart gives a smooth base for the ice.

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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