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Dessert

Compote of Pears

A sweetened pear compote simmered in water, reduced, and flavored with rum, kirsch, or lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and rum work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Compote of Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pears

  1. Peel the pears and place them in a stew-pan covered with water.

  2. Boil the pears for five hours.

  3. Transfer the pears to a dish or jar.

Finish the juice

  1. Reduce the cooking juice by boiling.

  2. Add a little rum, kirsch-wasser, or lemon juice to the reduced juice.

  3. Pour the juice over the pears.

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 + rumtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the fruit that is cooked until soft and tender in the syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cooking juice and helps thicken it as it reduces.
Rum, kirsch-wasser, or lemon juice
Adds aroma and a touch of acidity to the reduced juice.

The step that matters

Reducing the cooking juice. Boiling off water concentrates the sugars and flavours, so the juice becomes syrupy rather than thin. Stop too early and the sauce stays watery; go too far and it turns sticky and sweet.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rum. 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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