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Dessert

Quince Preserves

A preserve made by cooking peeled quinces with sugar and boiled water until tender and thickened.

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 ↓

Quince Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Parboil the quinces with the skins on.

  2. Peel and core the quinces.

Make the preserves

  1. Combine the water used for boiling with the sugar in a pot.

  2. Add the peeled and cored quinces to the pot.

  3. Cook until the quinces are tender and the mixture thickens.

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 body and pectin-rich flesh that becomes tender and sets the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken as the mixture cooks down.

The step that matters

Cook until the quinces are tender and the mixture thickens. Cooking must continue long enough for the quince to soften and for sugar and fruit pectin to concentrate and set. Stopping early leaves a runny syrup, while overcooking can make the preserve stiff and dark.

“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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