Skip to main content
Preserve

Canned Pears

A method for preserving pears by cooking them with sugar and water, then canning in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓
Canned Pears

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 ↓

Canned Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the pears and weigh them.

  2. Place the pears in a kettle with 1 lb of sugar and let them sit overnight.

Cook and can

  1. In the morning, add water and cook the pears until they are tender.

  2. Pack the cooked pears into jars, filling them to overflowing with their own juice.

  3. Seal the 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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
Form the fruit itself, softening when cooked and giving the canned product its body and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws juice out of the pears overnight, and helps preserve them.

The step that matters

Cook the pears until tender. Heat softens the pear cell walls and pectin. Pears that are underdone stay firm and hard, while overcooked pears break down and turn mushy in the jar.

“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