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Dessert

Stewed Pears

Stewed pears simmered with water, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and lemon juice until tender, then served with reduced syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Stewed Pears

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and halve the pears, leaving the stems on, and scoop out the cores.

  2. Place the pears in a saucepan, stem ends up, and pour in the water and sugar.

Stew

  1. Add the cloves, cinnamon, and lemon juice, then cover and stew gently until the pears are tender.

  2. Carefully remove the pears and place them on a serving dish.

  3. Boil down the syrup until thick, strain, and pour 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. Clove + cinnamontop 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 soft texture when stewed gently in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the poaching liquid and helps thicken the syrup as it reduces.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the pears' color fresh.

The step that matters

Stew gently until tender. Gentle heat softens the pears evenly without breaking them apart. A hard boil can turn the fruit mushy and cloud the syrup.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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