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Quinces, Preserved

This recipe preserves quinces in a sugar syrup until they become bright red and jelly-like.

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 ↓

Quinces, Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces.

  2. Boil in clear water until tender but not broken.

  3. Carefully remove the fruit and discard the water.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Make a syrup with ½ pound of sugar for each pound of quinces and ⅓ cup of water for every pound of sugar.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil, then add the fruit.

  3. Cook slowly for an hour until the fruit is bright red and the syrup is jelly-like.

  4. Transfer to glass jars and cover tightly.

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 that softens during boiling and turns bright red while cooking slowly in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it thickens with cooking, helps the syrup set jelly-like.

The step that matters

Boil the quinces until tender but not broken. Boiling in clear water softens the fruit's firm flesh so it can absorb syrup. Overcooking breaks the pieces apart, while undercooking leaves them too firm to take up sugar evenly.

“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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