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Dessert

Preserved Pears

A method for preserving pears in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a syrup by boiling 1 cup of water with 1 pound of sugar until clear.

  2. Skim any impurities from the syrup.

  3. If using large pears, cut them into halves or slices for quicker cooking.

  4. If pears are hard, parboil them until tender before preserving.

Flavor and preserve

  1. Stick a clove in the blossom end of each pear, if desired.

  2. Add the juice and rind of 1 lemon for every 5 pounds of pears, if desired.

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 + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

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

  5. 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 fruit that softens and turns tender as it is cooked in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in boiling water, forms the syrup that preserves it.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Parboil hard pears until tender. Hard pears absorb syrup slowly and stay firm, so parboiling softens the flesh first. Without it, the pears may remain tough even after long soaking in the syrup.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, lemon. 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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