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Dessert

Ginger Pears

Pears preserved in ginger, lemon, and orange with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ginger Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the ginger into thin slices.

  2. Press the juice out of the lemons and oranges, and shred their rind.

  3. Peel the pears and slice them crosswise.

Cook

  1. Add enough hot water to dissolve the sugar.

  2. When hot, add lemon juice, orange juice, ginger, lemon rind, orange peel, and pears.

  3. Cook slowly for 3 hours.

Jar and store

  1. Place in pint jars and seal.

  2. Store in a cool, dry place.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Ginger + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

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

  5. Pear + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the bulk and soft, tender texture of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken as it cooks down.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.
Preserved ginger
Contributes spicy aroma and a bit of chewy texture.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 3 hours. Long, gentle cooking lets the sugar dissolve fully and the pears and fruit peel soften and absorb syrup. Cooking too hard can scorch the sugar or break the pears down unevenly.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, lemon, sugar, orange):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, lemon, sugar, orange. 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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