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Pickled Pears

Pears pickled in a sweet and acidic syrup made with cider vinegar, sugar, water, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Pickled Pears

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Steam the pears until tender.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine sugar, vinegar, and water.

  2. Add cloves, cinnamon, and allspice to the mixture.

  3. Stir frequently while cooking until the sugar dissolves.

Pack and seal

  1. Pour the syrup over the pears in jars and seal.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the fruit body that softens during steaming and absorbs the syrup's flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out water.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve the fruit.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.

The step that matters

Stir until the sugar dissolves. Undissolved sugar can crystallise or leave the syrup gritty and unevenly sweet. Stirring while cooking helps the sugar fully dissolve into the hot liquid before the syrup is poured over the pears.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, allspice):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Quincefits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, allspice. 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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