Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Preserves

A sweet preserve made by boiling quince halves with sugar, water, and lemon slices until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Quince Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces.

  2. Weigh the quinces and measure out an equal quantity of sugar.

  3. Place the parings and cores in a preserving kettle.

  4. Cover with water.

  5. Boil for 30 minutes.

  6. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  7. Pour the juice back into the kettle.

Cook the quinces

  1. Boil the quinces in the juice a few at a time until tender.

  2. Lift the quinces out.

  3. Place them on a dish.

  4. If there is not enough liquid, add more water.

  5. Stir in the sugar.

  6. Boil for 10 minutes.

  7. Add the quinces back into the kettle.

  8. Boil until they change color, about 1 hour and 15 minutes on low heat.

Jar and serve

  1. Place the fruit in jars.

  2. Add a slice of lemon to each.

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 and pectin-rich flesh that sets and flavors the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Boil the quinces in the juice until tender, then until they change color. Quince is firm and tough when raw, so it must simmer gently until fully tender before the sugar is added. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave pieces hard or break them apart, and the color change shows the fruit has cooked through and taken on its rosy tone.

Swap the quince

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesQuince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes