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Dessert

Gingered Pears

A sweet dish of pears boiled with candied ginger, sugar, and lemon pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Gingered Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the pears and candied ginger.

  2. Boil the whole lemons in water until tender.

  3. Cut the lemons into small pieces and remove the seeds.

Cook

  1. Boil the pears and ginger with the sugar for 1 hour.

  2. Add the lemon pieces to the pear mixture and simmer for 1 hour.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  4. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Form the bulk of the preserve and release juices that soften as they cook.
Candied ginger
Adds warm, spicy aroma and flavour that stands up to long cooking.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken into a syrup as it cooks down.
Lemons
Add acidity and pectin-rich pith and peel that help the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boil the whole lemons until tender. Lemons must be fully softened before cutting, since underdone peel stays tough and bitter. Pectin in the peel and seeds helps the preserve set, so the seeds are removed only after cooking.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, 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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