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Dessert

To Preserve Jargonelle Pears

Pears preserved in a sugar syrup with ginger, boiled and stored for several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Preserve Jargonelle Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Gather the pears before they are fully ripe and pare them thinly, keeping the stalks.

  2. Place cabbage leaves in a preserving pan, lay in the pears, and cover with cold water.

  3. Boil the pears for 30 minutes.

  4. Check the pears for softness with a pin.

Make the syrup

  1. In a separate pot, boil the same weight of sugar as pears with a little water and remove scum.

  2. Add the whole ginger to the syrup.

  3. Boil the syrup with ginger for 10 minutes.

  4. Drain the pears and add them to the syrup.

  5. Boil the mixture for another 30 minutes.

  6. Transfer the pears to a deep dish.

  7. Pour the cooled syrup over the pears.

Rest and reboil

  1. Cover the pears and let sit for 4 days.

  2. Pour off the syrup.

  3. Boil the syrup for 10 minutes.

  4. Pour the boiled syrup back over the pears.

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 + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Cabbage + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together545 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pear + cabbagetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Soften during boiling and provide the fruit flavour and texture of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the pears and, in a thick syrup, preserves them by drawing out water.
Ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma that flavours the syrup and pears.

The step that matters

Check the pears for softness with a pin. Pears that are underboiled stay firm and hold little syrup, while overboiled pears collapse and turn mushy. A pin test shows when the flesh is tender enough to absorb the syrup without breaking apart.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, ginger. 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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