Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Quinces

A preserved fruit made by boiling orange quinces in sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and quince work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 152 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Preserved Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe, peel, quarter, and remove the core from the quinces.

Cook the quinces

  1. Cover the quinces with cold water and bring to a slow boil.

  2. Skim off any foam, then add one-quarter of the sugar on top without stirring.

  3. Once it boils, add another portion of sugar and continue until all the sugar is added.

  4. Let the quinces boil slowly until they reach your desired color, either light or dark.

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. Orange + quincetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Quince + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 body and flavor that the sugar syrup preserves and colors.
Sugar
Preserves the fruit and sweetens it, drawing out moisture to form a syrup.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar in portions without stirring. Sugar added in portions and left undisturbed dissolves gradually into the cooking liquid, so the fruit is preserved evenly without crystallizing or breaking apart. Stirring can disturb the fruit and encourage sugar crystals to form.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. 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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesQuince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes