Skip to main content
Dessert

Pears, Stewed

Stewed pears cooked with sugar, cloves, allspice, water, and port wine until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pears, Stewed

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and quarter the pears, removing the cores while leaving the stalks on.

Stew

  1. Place the pears in a lined saucepan with the sugar, cloves, allspice, water, and port wine.

  2. Simmer gently for 3 to 4 hours until the pears are tender, watching them closely.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pear + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pear + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Clove + port winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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 during long gentle simmering into a tender texture.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps build a syrup that glazes the pears.
Port wine
Contributes liquid and fruity flavour that infuses into the pears as they stew.

The step that matters

Simmering gently for 3 to 4 hours. Too hard a boil breaks the pears apart before they turn tender. A gentle simmer softens the fruit evenly while the liquid slowly reduces and thickens into a syrup.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, clove, allspice, port wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Pearthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Orangefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, allspice, port wine. 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.

You might also like

Clove CakeClove Cake53 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes