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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking pears with sugar, water, lemon peel, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the pears.

  2. Combine 4 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water in a pot and bring to a boil.

Make the syrup

  1. Add bits of lemon peel and boil until the syrup is clear.

  2. Add the pear pieces and cook until heated through.

Cook the pears

  1. Remove the pears, let them cool, then return them to the syrup and cook until soft but not broken.

  2. For small pears, pack them whole with a clove in each.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Pears
Provide the main fruit, softening into a tender texture as they simmer in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the pears and thickens the syrup, helping the fruit hold its shape.
Lemon peel
Adds a bright citrus aroma to the syrup.
Cloves
Add a warm, spiced aroma to the whole pears.

The step that matters

Cooling the pears before returning them to the syrup. Pears left in boiling syrup can break apart as their cell walls soften too fast. Cooling them first and then simmering gently lets the syrup penetrate slowly, so the pieces become soft but stay intact.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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