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Sweet Pickled Pears

A pickled pear recipe using cider vinegar, brown sugar, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Pare and halve the pears.

  2. In a pot, combine sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes.

Cook and pack

  1. Add the pears and cook until they are half tender.

  2. Place the pears in sterilized jars and fill with the boiling syrup.

  3. Seal jars airtight.

  4. If syrup is insufficient, boil additional water or vinegar to add.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Firm fruit that holds its shape during cooking and absorbs the spiced syrup.
Light brown sugar
Provides sweetness and helps preserve the pears while balancing the vinegar.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickling syrup its sharp, tangy character and aids preservation.
Cinnamon sticks
Contributes warm, sweet aroma to the syrup as it steeps into the fruit.
Whole cloves
Adds pungent, warm aroma that flavours the syrup absorbed by the pears.

The step that matters

Cooking the pears until half tender. Pears cooked too long turn soft and mushy, while undercooked pears stay hard and bland. Stopping at half tender lets them finish softening in the hot syrup and keeps their shape in the jar.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Quincefits about as well
  3. Pearthe original
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon. 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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