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Dessert

Stewed Pears

Stewed pears are cooked with sugar, lemon peel, cloves, allspice, water, and a little red wine.

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

Stewed Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and halve or quarter the pears, placing them in water to prevent browning.

  2. Pack the pears in a block-tin stewpan and sprinkle with sugar to taste.

Stew

  1. Add lemon peel, cloves, and cracked allspice.

  2. Cover the pears with water and add a little red wine.

  3. Cover the pan and stew for 3 to 4 hours until tender.

Finish

  1. Remove the pears and pour off the cooking liquid.

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. Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  3. Pear + red winetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + red winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 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
Their flesh softens during long stewing, becoming tender and absorbing the surrounding flavours.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pears develop a richer, deeper flavour as they cook.
Red wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the cooking liquid, flavouring the pears.

The step that matters

Cover the pan and stew for 3 to 4 hours until tender. Long, gentle stewing under cover breaks down the pears' cell walls slowly, so they become tender without falling apart. Too high a heat can toughen or break the fruit before it softens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, clove, allspice, red 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.

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