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Dessert

Pear-flawn, with Cream

A custard flan filled with pears and a creamy lemon butter custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Pear-flawn, with Cream

Ingredients

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 cream

  1. Mix flour, sugar, whole egg, egg yolks, salt, lemon zest, and butter until smooth to prepare a cream.

  2. Keep the cream warm but not thick.

Bake the flan

  1. Line a flan pan with short pastry or puff pastry.

  2. Cover the pastry with buttered paper.

  3. Fill the paper with common flour.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until set.

  5. Once out of the oven, empty the flour.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the flan with the prepared cream.

  2. Arrange whole small pears upright on top of the cream.

  3. Moisten the pears with a little of their syrup before serving.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + peartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Whole eggs and yolks set the cream into a custard that holds its shape when baked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the cream a smooth, tender texture.
All-purpose flour
Gives the cream body and helps it hold together as it sets.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps it brown lightly at the edges.
Small pears
Provide fruit flavor and moisture on top of the set cream.

The step that matters

Keep the cream warm but not thick. Eggs thicken as they heat, so overheating the cream can make it grainy or lumpy before baking. Keeping it warm but fluid lets it blend smoothly and set evenly in the oven.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, egg, lemon, butter, syrup):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, egg, lemon, butter, syrup. 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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