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Dessert

Canned Quinces

A preserved quince dish made by blanching quinces and preserving them in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 336 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Canned Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Blanch quinces in boiling water for 2 minutes, then plunge into cold water.

  2. Pack the quinces whole, quartered, or sliced into Perfect Seal Jars.

Fill and seal

  1. Prepare a syrup with 1 pint of sugar and 1 ½ pints of water, or 1 pint of sugar and 1 pint of water, and fill the jars completely.

  2. Optionally, add a slice of lemon to each jar.

  3. Seal jars with rubbers and tops, adjust the spring, and sterilize in boiling water for 20 minutes.

  4. Press down the spring and remove.

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 + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Quinces
Provide the fruit itself, which softens and turns tender during the boiling water bath.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit's shape and flavour in the jar.

The step that matters

Filling the jars completely. Leaving headspace with the syrup not covering the fruit can let air remain in the jar, which may cause the fruit to discolour and weakens the vacuum seal during sterilizing.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, sugar. 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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