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Baked Pears

Baked pears are pears baked with lemon rind, sugar, and water until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Baked Pears

Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Baked Pears

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Peel, halve, and core the pears.

Bake

  1. Place them in an earthenware jar with lemon rind, sugar, and enough water to nearly cover them.

  2. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven overnight until tender.

  3. For hard baking pears, bake for about 24 hours, ensuring they are gently baked.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Their flesh softens during slow baking, becoming tender and spoonable.
Sugar
Sweetens the pears and the syrup they bake in.
Lemon rind
Adds a bright citrus aroma that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Baking low and slow until tender. Hard pears have dense, starchy flesh that only breaks down with long, gentle heat. Stopping early leaves them firm, while high heat can toughen the outside or make them split and scorch. Check for tenderness rather than relying only on the clock.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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