Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Preserves

A preserve made by cooking quinces with boiling water and sugar until the fruit is clear and red.

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. Wash and wipe the quinces.

  2. Pare, core, and slice the quinces, placing them in cold water to prevent discoloration.

  3. Put the quinces in a kettle and barely cover with boiling water.

  4. Simmer until tender, then carefully remove the fruit and add the parings to the liquid.

  5. Cover and simmer for one hour.

Make the syrup

  1. Strain the juice and add one pint of sugar for every pint of juice, stirring until dissolved.

  2. Bring to a boil and boil hard for fifteen minutes, skimming well.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the quinces and boil until they are clear and red, keeping covered for better color.

  2. Transfer the quinces into hot sterilized jelly glasses.

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 sets the preserve as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at this concentration, helps it thicken and keep.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup hard and skimming it well. Boiling the sugar and juice hard drives off water so the preserve thickens, and skimming removes foam that would cloud the finished preserve.

“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