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Dessert

To Steiv Pears

A sweet dish of pears stewed with cloves, lemon peel, red wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and red wine work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

To Steiv Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter 6 pears, and peel the other 6 without cutting them.

  2. Place all the pears in a deep ceramic pot.

  3. Add cloves, lemon peel, red wine, and sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the pot tightly with coarse brown paper.

  2. Bake until the pears are tender.

  3. Serve hot or cold.

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + red winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pear + lemontop 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

Pears
Provide the main body and fruit flavour, softening into a tender, juicy dish as they bake.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour, and helps the pears colour as they stew.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the syrup thicken and caramelise slightly during baking.

The step that matters

Covering the pot tightly. A tight seal traps steam so the pears cook gently in their own liquid and wine. If the cover leaks, the liquid evaporates, the pears can dry out and the syrup won't develop properly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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