Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Cream

Pear cream is a chilled dessert made from mashed pears, clarified sugar, lemon juice, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Cut the pears into quarters, peel, and core them.

  2. Mash the pears well with a wooden spoon in a tammy.

Make the cream

  1. Add the clarified sugar and lemon juice to the mashed pears.

  2. Dissolve the isinglass in the mixture without letting it set.

  3. Rub the mixture through the tammy into large or small molds.

  4. Surround the molds with ice and let them set.

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 of the pulp, flavour and body of the cream.
Clarified sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pear flavour and keeps it from tasting flat.
Isinglass
Acts as a gelling agent so the mixture sets firm when chilled.

The step that matters

Dissolve the isinglass without letting it set. Isinglass is a gelatin-like setting agent, so if the mixture cools or thickens before it is fully dissolved and evenly mixed, it can set unevenly or in lumps and the cream will not hold a smooth texture when moulded.

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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes