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Dessert

Stewed Pears

Stewed pears are cooked with sugar, water, peelings, cloves, and cochineal until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Stewed Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the quartered pears in a stewpan.

  2. Add the sugar and enough cold water to cover the pears.

  3. Include the pear peelings, cloves, and cochineal.

Cook

  1. Cook over medium heat until the pears are tender.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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 as they cook, turning tender while holding its shape in the syrup.
White sugar
Sweetens the cooking liquid and forms a syrup that flavours the pears.
Cloves
Add a warm, spiced aroma to the syrup as it cooks.
Cochineal
Gives the pears and syrup a red colour.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat until the pears are tender. Gentle heat lets the pear flesh soften evenly through to the centre. Stronger heat can break the pears apart and make the syrup cloudy, while overcooking leaves them mushy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

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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