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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking pears with sugar, water, egg white, and optional ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and halve the pears, removing cores and hard parts, and soak them in cold water to prevent browning.

  2. Weigh the pears and measure ¾ pound of sugar for each pound of fruit.

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in 1 cup of water for each pound of sugar.

  2. Add 1 egg white for every 5 pounds of sugar to the mixture.

  3. In a preserving kettle, boil the sugar mixture until scum forms, then remove the scum.

Cook and finish

  1. Add the pears to the kettle and boil slowly until they look clear.

  2. Remove the pears with a perforated skimmer and spread them on dishes to cool.

  3. Boil the syrup until thick, then pour it over the cooled pears.

  4. Optionally, add thinly sliced ginger boiled in the syrup for flavor.

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 + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Pear + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 cooked until clear and set in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at this concentration, helps preserve the fruit and thicken the syrup.
Egg white
Binds to impurities when boiled, so scum rises and can be skimmed off, clearing the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the pears slowly until they look clear. Boiling too hard breaks the fruit apart, while too little heat leaves it opaque. Slow simmering lets sugar slowly replace the water in the pear tissue, so the fruit turns translucent and keeps its shape.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Allspicefits less well

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