Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Preserves

A sweet preserve made from sliced quinces cooked in water and sugar, then boiled and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Quince Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Peel and cut the quinces into round slices.

  2. Cook the slices in water until tender.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Make a syrup with the cooking water and 1 ½ pounds of sugar.

  2. Return the fruit to the kettle and boil gently for 30 minutes.

Jar and seal

  1. Transfer the preserves to jars and seal.

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
Provide the fruit and natural pectin that helps the preserves thicken and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boil gently after returning the fruit. A gentle simmer keeps the slices intact while the syrup thickens. A hard, rapid boil can break the fruit apart and scorch the sugar, which darkens and changes the flavour.

“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

Quince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes