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Dessert

Conerved Pears

A method of preserving pears by simmering them in water and sugar syrup, optionally flavored with cochineal, spices, or port wine.

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

Conerved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Place peeled pears in a stone pan with water and simmer until soft.

  2. Skim the pears and let them cool.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Prepare a syrup with 3½ cups water and 1 pound sugar.

  2. Simmer the pears in the syrup for about 10 minutes, then let them sit in the syrup overnight.

  3. Pour off the syrup and simmer the pears again for about 10 minutes.

  4. Repeat the simmering in syrup 3 or 4 times.

  5. Add powdered cochineal, cinnamon, or port wine during the boiling process, if desired.

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. Pear + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cinnamon + port winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  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
Provide the fruit that softens and turns tender during simmering and steeping.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a thick syrup, helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Repeated simmering in syrup. Each simmer and overnight rest lets syrup slowly replace the water in the pears, so the fruit stays firm and clear rather than breaking down. Heating too hard or too long can make the pears collapse.

“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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