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Dessert

Pears, Baked

Pears baked with lemon, cloves, allspice, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pears, Baked

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and halve the pears, or quarter if large, leaving the stalks on and removing the cores.

  2. Place the pears in a clean baking jar with a tight lid.

Make the syrup

  1. Add lemon rind in strips, lemon juice, cloves, allspice, and enough water to cover the pears.

  2. Add sugar in the proportion of 1 lb for every pint of water.

Bake

  1. Cover the jar tightly and place it in a very cool oven.

  2. Bake the pears for 5 to 6 hours, ensuring the oven is not too 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.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  3. Pear + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pear + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Form the main body of the dish, softening into tender fruit during the long slow bake.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the pears keep their shape and gloss as they cook.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic oils that balance the sweetness of the syrup.
Cloves
Contribute warm, spiced aroma that infuses into the syrup and fruit.
Allspice
Adds warm, spiced aroma that infuses into the syrup and fruit.

The step that matters

Keep the oven very cool. A very cool, gentle oven lets the pears soften slowly without boiling or breaking down. A hot oven would make the syrup simmer hard, toughening the fruit and risking it collapsing into mush.

Swap the pear

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, clove, allspice, 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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