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Dessert

Stewed Pears

Stewed pears are cooked in water with sugar, cochineal, and vanilla essence until tender, then served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 334 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Stewed Pears

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Peel the pears thinly and cut them into quarters.

  2. Place the pears in a stewing jar and add enough water to cover them.

  3. Add the sugar, cochineal, and vanilla essence.

  4. Cover and stew until the pears are tender.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a glass dish and pour rich custard over the pears.

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 + vanillatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together334 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Chinese hard pears (kati)
The main fruit; stewing softens its firm flesh until tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pears and the cooking liquid.
Vanilla essence
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the stewed pears.
Cochineal
Gives the pears a red color.

The step that matters

Stew until the pears are tender. Pears vary in firmness, so check them with a knife rather than relying only on time. Overcooking turns them mushy, while undercooking leaves them hard. Gentle, covered stewing softens the fruit evenly.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vanilla. 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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