Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling pears with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and core the ripe pears.

  2. Weigh the pears and boil them in a little water until tender.

  3. Mash the pears to a pulp.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Add ¼ pound of sugar for each pound of fruit and cook slowly.

  2. Stir continually until the mixture is very thick.

  3. Add any flavoring you like, or leave it out if preferred.

Jar

  1. Transfer the marmalade into glass or stone jars.

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

Ripe pears
Provide the main fruit, bulk and pectin-rich pulp that thickens into the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the mixture thicken and keep as a preserve.

The step that matters

Stir continually until very thick. Sugar-rich fruit mixtures scorch easily on the bottom of the pan as water evaporates, and the sugar concentration must rise enough to set the preserve properly; constant stirring prevents burning and uneven thickening.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes