Skip to main content
Dessert

Quinces, Canned

A preserved fruit dish made by cooking quinces with sugar and water, then canning them in sealed jars.

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 ↓

Quinces, Canned

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Wash and wipe the quinces.

  2. Remove blemishes and the blossom end.

  3. Peel, halve, and cut each half into three pieces.

  4. Remove the cores and save them along with the skins for jelly.

Cook and can

  1. In a preserving kettle, mix the sugar and water.

  2. Add the quinces, ensuring the water covers them evenly.

  3. Cook over low heat until soft enough for a fork to pierce easily, but do not break them.

  4. Transfer the hot quinces into hermetically sealed glass jars.

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 itself, whose firm flesh softens during cooking while holding its shape.
White granulated sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, in the syrup, helps preserve it in the jars.
Water
Forms the syrup that covers the quinces and carries heat evenly through the fruit.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat without breaking the quinces. Gentle heat softens the fruit's cell walls evenly, so the pieces become tender while keeping their shape. Vigorous boiling breaks the pieces apart and makes the texture mushy.

“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