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Preserve

To Preserve Jargonelle Pears

A method for preserving Jargonelle pears in a sugar syrup with ginger and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Preserve Jargonelle Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Gather pears with stalks before they are quite ripe.

  2. Pare the pears as thinly as possible, keeping the stalks.

  3. Cut out the black top carefully.

  4. Place the pears in cold water.

  5. Place cabbage leaves in the bottom of a preserving pan.

  6. Lay the pears in the pan.

  7. Cover the pears with cold water and one or two cabbage leaves on top.

  8. Boil the pears for 30 minutes.

  9. Lay the boiled pears on a dish.

Make the syrup and cook the pears

  1. Combine 6 pounds of sugar with 1 quart of cold water in a separate pot.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim off the foam.

  3. Add the soaked and scraped ginger and the juice and rind of the lemons to the syrup.

  4. Boil the syrup for 10 minutes.

  5. Add the pears to the syrup.

  6. Let the pears boil in the syrup for 20 minutes.

  7. Remove the pears and place them in a bowl or deep dish.

  8. Boil the syrup for 8 minutes.

  9. Let the syrup cool.

  10. Pour the cooled syrup over the pears.

  11. Cover the pears with paper.

Rest, repeat and jar

  1. In 4 days, pour off the syrup.

  2. Boil the remaining syrup for 8 minutes.

  3. Pour the cooled syrup over the pears.

  4. Repeat this process in 4 days and again a third time.

  5. Stick a clove into each pear where the black top was cut out.

  6. Place the pears in jars.

  7. Divide the ginger and lemon peel among the jars.

  8. Pour the cooled syrup over the pears in the jars.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

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

  3. Ginger + cabbagetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together545 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + cabbagetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together397 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + peartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, as it concentrates, preserves the pears.
Jargonelle pears
Provide the fruit that softens and absorbs the sweet syrup during repeated boiling.
White ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Lemons
Add acidity and fragrant citrus oils to brighten the syrup.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup boiling and cooling. Boiling the syrup concentrates its sugar, and pouring it off and reboiling over several days lets the sugar slowly penetrate the pears. Skipping or rushing these rounds leaves the fruit less preserved and more prone to spoiling.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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