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Preserved Pears with Ginger

A preserved pear dish sweetened with sugar and flavored with ginger and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon 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 ↓

Preserved Pears with Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Weigh 3/4 pound of sugar for every pound of pears.

  2. Boil 4 ounces of whole ginger in water.

Make the syrup

  1. Add 4 pounds of sugar, the juice of 1 lemon, and the yellow peel of the lemon to the ginger.

  2. Stir until the sugar dissolves and the mixture thickens.

Preserve

  1. Pour over the prepared pears and let cool before sealing.

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. Ginger + lemontop 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. Sugar + peartop 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

Pears
Provide the fruit that is preserved and softened in the sweet syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and thickens the syrup while preserving it.
Whole ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic spiciness that flavors the syrup and fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar into the ginger syrup. Sugar must fully dissolve and the mixture must thicken before pouring over the pears. Undissolved sugar can crystallize, and a thin syrup may not preserve the fruit well.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

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