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Dessert

Fears and Quinces

A preserve made from pears or quinces cooked with sugar, optionally flavored with lemon or ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger 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 ↓

Fears and Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, halve, and core the fruit, then drop it into cold water until ready.

Cook

  1. Cook the fruit in water until tender, keeping it covered to prevent darkening.

  2. Once tender, pour off the water, leaving it an inch below the fruit's surface.

  3. Add the sugar and boil for ten minutes.

  4. If desired, add slices of lemon or small pieces of ginger root just before canning.

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. Lemon + gingertop 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. Sugar + gingertop 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).

Sugar and ginger 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

Fruit (pears or quinces)
Forms the body of the preserve, softening as it cooks until tender.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken and keep as it boils.

The step that matters

Keeping the fruit covered while it cooks. Cut pears and quinces darken quickly when exposed to air. Keeping them covered and submerged slows browning, so the finished preserve keeps a pale, appealing colour.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, ginger. 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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