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Dessert

Canned Pears

A preserved pear dish made by cooking pears with sugar, lemon, spices, and ginger, then bottling while hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Canned Pears

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Canned Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tie the cinnamon and nutmeg in a thin muslin bag.

  2. Combine all ingredients in a pot.

Cook and seal

  1. Cook until the pears turn pink.

  2. Bottle and seal while hot.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Make up the bulk of the fruit and soften as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by binding water.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the fruit.
Cinnamon
Adds a warm aroma to the fruit and syrup.
Ginger root
Adds a sharp, spicy aroma.

The step that matters

Bottle and seal while hot. Filling the jars while the pears are still hot helps drive air out of the jar and lets a seal form as the contents cool. Jars left to cool before sealing are more likely to fail to seal.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Pearthe original

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