Skip to main content
Dessert

Compote De Poires Grilldes: — Compote of Baked Pears

A compote made by baking pears, then simmering them with water, cinnamon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Compote De Poires Grilldes: — Compote of Baked Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Bake the pears

  1. Preheat a Dutch oven.

  2. Place the baked pears in the oven until the skin is well burned, turning them to bake evenly.

  3. Remove the pears from the oven and place them in water to cool.

  4. Rub off the skin, cut the pears in halves, remove the seeds, and wash them in several waters.

Make the compote

  1. In a pot, combine the pears, 1 pint of water, cinnamon, and sugar.

  2. Cover the pot and let the mixture stew until the pears are soft.

  3. Reduce the syrup and serve hot.

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. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Cinnamon and sugar 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

Baking pears
Provide the main fruit, which softens and breaks down into the compote's body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the syrup as it reduces.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma that complements the cooked pear flavor.

The step that matters

Reduce the syrup and serve hot. Reducing concentrates the sugar and pear juices into a thicker syrup. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, while cooking too long can make it sticky.

Swap the pear

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, sugar. 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

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes