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Dessert

To Preserve Pears Whole

Pears are preserved whole in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Preserve Pears Whole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Select nice pears, free from blemish.

  2. Peel the pears, leaving a short bit of stem.

  3. Weigh the pears.

  4. Use 1 pound of granulated sugar for each pound of fruit.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Dissolve the sugar in water.

  2. Boil the sugar water.

  3. Skim off any foam.

  4. Add the pears to the boiling syrup.

  5. Cook the pears until they are clear and easily pierced with a fork.

  6. Remove the pears with a slotted spoon.

Cool and jar

  1. Place the pears on flat dishes to cool.

  2. Transfer the cooled pears to jars.

  3. Wait until the syrup thickens.

  4. Pour the syrup over the pears.

  5. Place a clove in the blossom end of each pear.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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 and preserved in the syrup.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a thick syrup, preserves it by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Cook the pears until clear and easily pierced with a fork. Cooking in syrup softens the fruit and lets sugar slowly replace its water. Undercooked pears stay firm and hard, while overcooking makes them mushy and breaks them down, so the fork test shows when they are done.

“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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