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Dessert

Pear Mould

A molded dessert of stewed pears with cinnamon, cloves, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pear Mould

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and quarter the pears.

  2. Stew the pears with cloves, cinnamon, and sugar in water until tender.

  3. Add cochineal to color the mixture.

  4. Carefully place the pears in a fancy mold.

Make the syrup and set

  1. Take ½ cup of the liquid from the stewed pears and add a strip of lemon peel and the lemon juice.

  2. Soak the gelatine in cold water, then melt it in the liquid mixture.

  3. Boil quickly for five minutes, then let it cool.

  4. Pour the mixture over the pears in the mold.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + lemontop 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
Provide the main body and fruit flavor of the mould once softened by stewing.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid so the mould holds its shape when turned out.
Sugar
Sweetens the stewing liquid and balances the lemon's acidity.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and sharpens the sweetness.

The step that matters

Melting the gelatine into the liquid. Gelatine must be fully dissolved and the mixture not boiled hard for long, since gelatine's setting strength depends on it dissolving completely. Letting the liquid cool before pouring keeps it from thinning the pears or setting unevenly in the mould.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, cinnamon, sugar, clove. 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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