Skip to main content
Dessert

Mousse Aux Poires

A chilled pear mousse made by cooking pears with sugar, sieving, and adding vanilla and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pear and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 334 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Mousse Aux Poires

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, core, and slice the pears.

  2. Place the pears and sugar in a saucepan with enough water to cover them.

Cook and strain

  1. Cook until the pears are tender.

  2. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve while hot.

Finish

  1. Add the vanilla essence and stir in ice until 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 + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together334 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Vanilla + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Pears
Provide the main body and flavour, and when cooked and sieved they form the smooth mousse base.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the pears and helps keep the finished mousse soft and smooth.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the mousse a light, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Pass the mixture through a fine sieve while hot. Hot cooked pear is soft enough to press through the sieve, leaving a smooth purée without fibrous lumps. Straining it while hot also helps it cool to a smooth texture.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vanilla, 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.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes