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Dessert

Baked Pears Pie

A pie made with pears, cloves, cinnamon, citrus peel, liquor, sugar, rose water, and optional port or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Baked Pears Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Quarter the pears, peel their skins, and core them.

  3. Roll out a crust of fine paste and lay it in a pie dish.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the pears in the crust, sprinkling cloves, beaten cinnamon, and finely chopped Seville orange or lemon peel between layers.

  2. Pour the liquor from baking the pears over the layers.

  3. Seal the pie and place it in the oven to bake.

Finish

  1. Optionally, after baking, raise the lid on one side and add sugar, rose-water, beaten cinnamon, and a splash of red port or brandy, or cream.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Clove + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the main fruit filling, softening as they bake and giving the pie its body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the flavours of the fruit and spices stand out.
Fine paste
Forms the crust that holds the filling and bakes into a firm, golden case.
Liquor from baking pears
Adds moisture and fruit flavour to the filling as the pie bakes.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the fruit layers.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, cinnamon, orange, sugar, rose, brandy, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, cinnamon, orange, sugar, rose, brandy, cream. 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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