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Dessert

Preserved Quinces

Preserved quinces are quince fruit stewed with water and sugar until tender.

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 ↓

Preserved Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Remove the cores from the quinces.

  2. Stew the quinces in water until it thickens.

  3. Strain out the cores.

  4. Add sugar to the liquid.

Cook the fruit

  1. Peel the quinces.

  2. Cut the quinces into pieces.

  3. Add the pieces to the liquid.

  4. Stew until tender.

  5. Cover immediately.

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 liquid thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out its water.

The step that matters

Stew until tender. Quinces have very firm flesh that needs long, gentle cooking to soften. Stopping early leaves the fruit hard and the texture grainy, and it does not turn the flesh tender.

“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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