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Dessert

Preserved Pears

A method of preserving pears in a sugar syrup with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine water and sugar in a pot to make syrup.

  2. Pare the pears and drop them in cold water to preserve their color.

Cook and jar

  1. Cook the pears in boiling syrup until tender enough to pierce with a straw.

  2. Transfer the pears to hot jars, fill with boiling syrup, and add two slices of lemon to each jar.

  3. Seal the jars.

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. Sugar + peartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Pears
Provide the fruit itself, softening during cooking to become tender and hold their shape in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out water and inhibiting spoilage.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma that balance the sweetness of the syrup and pears.

The step that matters

Cook the pears until tender enough to pierce with a straw. Pears must soften fully so the hot syrup penetrates evenly. Undercooked pears stay firm and grainy, while overcooked pears break down and turn mushy in the jar.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pear. 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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