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Dessert

Preserved Quinces

A preserved quince dish made by boiling quinces, drying them, and cooking them slowly in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,444 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Preserved Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare and quarter the quinces, removing all cores and hard parts.

  2. Boil the quinces in clear water until tender.

  3. Spread the quinces on towels to dry.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a pot, combine sugar and water to make a syrup.

  2. When the syrup is boiling hot, add the quinces and cook very slowly.

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. Quince + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 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

Quinces
The main fruit; boiling softens its flesh so it becomes tender and holds its shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms a syrup that draws moisture out and preserves it.

The step that matters

Cooking the quinces slowly in the syrup. Cooking very slowly keeps the already-softened fruit from breaking apart, while the warm syrup gradually penetrates the flesh and sweetens it. Vigorous boiling would break the fruit down and make the syrup cloudy.

“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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