Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Sweetmeats

A preserved quince dish made by boiling quince rings, cooking them in syrup, and canning the result.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare, core, and weigh the quinces.

  2. Use ¾ pound of sugar for every pound of quince.

  3. Cut the quinces into rings.

  4. Boil the parings and cores in just enough cold water to cover them until very tender.

  5. Place the parings and cores in a bag and let them drip without squeezing.

Cook the rings

  1. In a kettle, add a little water and one layer of quince rings.

  2. Cover tightly and cook until a straw goes through the rings.

  3. Carefully skim the rings out and place them in a tureen.

  4. Repeat the process until all quinces are boiled.

Make the syrup and pack

  1. In the kettle, combine the sugar with the water from which the quinces were skimmed and the drippings from the bag.

  2. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes and skim.

  3. Pour the syrup over the fruit, cover tightly, and let it stand for 10 days.

  4. After 10 days, place a colander over the kettle and pour the contents of the tureen into it, ensuring all juice drains into the kettle.

  5. Return the quinces to the tureen.

  6. Boil the syrup for 20 minutes, then pour it over the quinces.

  7. Pack into cans and screw the covers 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 main fruit, whose pectin and firm flesh set the sweetmeats into tender rings.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, boiled into syrup, preserves it and helps it keep its shape.

The step that matters

Cooking the rings until a straw goes through. Quince is firm and needs thorough cooking to become tender; stopping early leaves hard, gritty fruit, while overcooking breaks the rings apart in the syrup.

“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