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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from pears, sugar, and lemon juice and rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and quarter the pears, removing the seeds.

  2. Place the pears in a little fresh water and cook them on the fire until soft.

  3. Mash the pears with a wooden spoon.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the sugar and the lemon juice and rind, mixing well.

  2. Return the mixture to the fire and stir while boiling until it reaches a thick consistency.

  3. Pour the marmalade into pots.

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. 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 bulk and fruity flavour of the marmalade as they break down into pulp.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it dissolves and concentrates, helps it thicken and set.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma from the juice and grated rind, balancing the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling until thick. Sugar and fruit pectin set only when the mixture is boiled long enough to concentrate. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it dense and sticky.

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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