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Dessert

Pear or Peach with Cloves

A fruit dish of pear or peach stewed with cloves in a hot sugar‑water syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Pear or Peach with Cloves

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stick 2 cloves into the pear or peach.

  2. Heat the syrup until hot.

  3. Cook the fruit in the hot syrup until tender.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pear + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together254 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Clove + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Clove and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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

Pear or peach
Softens as it cooks in the syrup, becoming tender and juicy.
Cloves
Adds warm, spicy aroma that infuses the fruit.
Syrup
Sugar and water carry sweetness and moisture, and help the fruit cook gently.

The step that matters

Cook the fruit until tender. Fruit softens as its cell walls break down with heat. Cook it gently in the hot syrup and check often, because overcooking turns it mushy and makes it lose its shape.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, syrup, 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.

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