Name: To Can Pears
Ingredients: Kiefer pears; ½ cup sugar; boiling water

Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

To Can Pears

Ingredients

Kiefer pears
½ cup sugar
boiling water

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pears

Pick Kiefer pears and let them ripen until golden.
Peel, quarter, and core the pears.
Place the pears in a tight vessel.

Sweeten and bake

Add ½ cup of sugar for each can.
Pour enough boiling water to nearly cover the pears.
Cover tightly and bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 30 minutes.

Seal

Seal the jars as you would for peaches.

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.

Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Kiefer pears: Provide the fruit that becomes tender and holds its shape during the bake.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps preserve the pears' flavor during canning.

“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.