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Baked Pears a LA Erancaise

Baked pears stewed and baked in a claret and water syrup, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and red wine work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Baked Pears a LA Erancaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel the pears and cut the bottoms so they stand upright, leaving the stalks intact.

Stew

  1. Place the pears in a saucepan with water, claret, and sugar.

  2. Stew gently for about 45 minutes, depending on the size of the pears.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer the pears to a porcelain baking dish with the syrup.

  2. Add a little more claret and bake until soft but not falling apart.

  3. Baste frequently with the claret and serve hot in the same dish with a napkin around it.

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 + red winetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

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

  3. Red wine + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together864 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Baking pears
Provide the fruit that softens and becomes tender as it stews and bakes.
Claret (red wine)
Adds acidity and flavour to the syrup and gives the pears their colour.
Sugar
Sweetens the wine syrup and helps it thicken slightly as it reduces.

The step that matters

Bake until soft but not falling apart. Pears keep softening after they leave the heat, and overcooked fruit collapses as its cell walls break down. Checking for tenderness while the pears still hold their shape keeps them intact and moist.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Pearthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Applefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, 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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