Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
Preserved Pears
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pears
Pare the pears with a silver knife and drop them into a bowl of cold water to preserve their color.
Place the pears in a pan of clear, cold water and boil until almost tender.
Make the syrup and cook
Make a syrup using the water from boiling the pears, adding 1 pound of sugar for each ½ pint of water.
Drop the pears into the syrup and cook slowly until they can be pierced with a silver fork.
Jar and seal
Place the fruit in hot jars and cover with the boiling syrup.
Seal the jars.
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.
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Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,079 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Pears
- Provide the fruit that is cooked until tender and preserved in syrup.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
The step that matters
Cook the pears slowly in the syrup until pierced with a silver fork. Cooking gently lets sugar penetrate the fruit evenly and softens it without breaking it apart. Rapid boiling can toughen the surface or disintegrate the pears before they are properly infused.
“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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