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Dessert

Preserved Pears

A method of preserving pears by boiling them in a sugar syrup until clear.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pears

  1. Pare and core the pears.

  2. Boil the pears in water until tender.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. In a separate pot, make a syrup with 1 pound of sugar and 1 pound of water.

  2. Add the tender pears to the syrup and boil until the fruit is clear.

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Their cell walls soften as they cook, making the fruit tender and translucent.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved in syrup, helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boiling the pears in syrup until clear. Heat softens the pear's cell walls while the sugar syrup gradually replaces water in the fruit, making it clear. Boil too hard or too long and the pears break down; stop too soon and they stay opaque.

“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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