Name: To Preserve Quinces
Ingredients: 1 pound quinces; 1 pound sugar; ½ cup water (from boiling quinces)

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 ↓

To Preserve Quinces

Ingredients

1 pound quinces
1 pound sugar
½ cup water (from boiling quinces)

Directions

Cook the quinces

Boil the quinces until tender.
Remove the skins and set them aside for jelly.
Optionally pare and quarter the quinces, saving the uncooked skins and cores for jelly.

Make the syrup

Combine the water from boiling the quinces with the sugar to make syrup.
Use this syrup for both apples and quinces if desired.

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: Provide the main fruit, which softens when boiled and gives the preserve its flavor.
Sugar: Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by binding water it would otherwise need.

“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.