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Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling pears with sugar, optionally flavored with spice or lemon, and optionally including apple pulp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Boil the pears in water until soft.

  2. Remove the skins by rubbing with a soft cloth.

  3. Sieve the pulp.

Make the marmalade

  1. Bring the pulp to a boil.

  2. Heat the sugar in the oven.

  3. Stir the heated sugar into the boiling pulp.

  4. Simmer the mixture until done, being careful not to scorch it.

  5. Test for consistency; it should be rather stiff.

Prepare hard pears

  1. For hard pears, peel them.

  2. Bake the peeled pears with some sugar and a little water until pulpy.

  3. Finish the hard pears as above.

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 + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  5. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 pulp that becomes the body and flavor of the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the pulp and, as it cooks down, helps it thicken to a stiff set.

The step that matters

Simmering without scorching. Once the sugar is stirred in, the pulp can burn on the bottom of the pan. Scorched sugar turns bitter and dark, spoiling the flavor of the whole batch.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, sugar, apple):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, apple. 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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