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Dessert

Compote of Roast Pears

A compote made from roasted pears simmered in a sugar and dried orange flower syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and orange work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 323 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Compote of Roast Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Roast and peel

  1. Roast the cooking pears until the skin is completely burnt.

  2. Soak the pears in cold water and remove the burnt skin.

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine white sugar and dried orange flowers, and bring to a boil.

  2. Strain out the orange flowers and return the syrup to the heat.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the pears to the syrup and boil until it reaches a bead stage.

  2. Allow the pears to cool, then serve in compote dishes.

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 + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Cooking pears
Provide the main fruit, whose flesh softens and turns tender-sweet during boiling in syrup.
White sugar
Sweetens the compote and thickens the syrup as it reduces to the bead stage.
Dried orange flowers
Infuse the syrup with a floral aroma, then are strained out before the pears are added.

The step that matters

Boiling the pears until the syrup reaches the bead stage. Boiling concentrates the sugar in the syrup. If it is cooked too briefly the syrup stays thin, and if overcooked it turns too thick and sticky. Stopping at the bead stage gives a syrup that clings to the fruit.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Orangethe 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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