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Dessert

Pear Preserves

Preserved pears cooked in a sugar syrup with optional clove, ginger, or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the pears and quarter them if large, or halve them if small.

  2. In a pot, combine sugar and a little water to make a thick syrup.

Cook and seal

  1. Add the pears to the syrup, inserting a clove stick into each piece if desired, or flavor with ginger or lemon.

  2. Cook the pears until tender, then transfer them to jars and seal immediately.

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 + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 body and flavor of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it by drawing out water.

The step that matters

Cook the pears until tender. Pears must be cooked fully so they soften evenly in the syrup. Undercooked pieces stay firm and hard, while the sugar concentration needs enough cooking to thicken the syrup properly.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar, ginger, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, ginger, lemon. 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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