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Dessert

Stewed Pears

A sweet stew of pears simmered in sugar syrup with lemon rind and cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stewed Pears

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel the pears, cut them in halves or quarters, and core them.

  2. Put the pears into a saucepan with enough water to cover them.

Stew and finish

  1. Add 10 ounces of sugar for every quart of water, cochineal, and lemon rind.

  2. Simmer until the pears are cooked, about 3 to 5 hours.

  3. Transfer the pears to a glass dish, reduce the syrup, and pour it over the pears.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the pears keep their shape as they cook.
Stewing pears
Provide the fruit that softens and absorbs the sweet syrup during long simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer until the pears are cooked. Stewing pears are firm and need long, gentle simmering to soften evenly. Boiling hard can break the fruit apart, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer and test for tenderness with a knife.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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