Name: Canning Quinces
Ingredients: 1 lb quinces; ½ lb sugar; 1 cup water

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 ↓

Canning Quinces

Ingredients

1 lb quinces
½ lb sugar
1 cup water

Directions

Prepare

Pare, quarter, and core the quinces.
Simmer them in water until tender.

Make the syrup and pack

Drain the quinces and place them in hot syrup made with sugar and water.
Let them simmer for 10 minutes at 170°F (77°C).
Transfer the quinces into 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.

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: Firm fruit that softens when simmered, becoming tender and absorbing the surrounding syrup.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves the quinces.

“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.