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Preserved Quinces

A preserved quince recipe using sugar and water to create a syrup and jar the fruit.

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 ↓

Preserved Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces.

  2. Boil the quinces in just enough water to cover them until tender.

  3. Carefully remove the quinces and place them on a dish.

Make the preserves

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 1 pint of the cooking water with 1½ pounds of sugar until clear.

  2. Add the quinces to the syrup and boil until a broom straw can easily pass through them.

  3. Transfer the quinces to glass jars and seal with paper and egg white.

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, its flavor, and natural pectin that helps the preserves set.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it and thicken the syrup.
Egg white (in the method)
Acts as a binder that helps the paper seal stick to the jar.

The step that matters

Boiling the quinces in the syrup. Boil until the fruit is tender enough for a broom straw to pass through, but not so long that it breaks apart. Sugar concentration and pectin together determine how the preserves set and hold their shape.

“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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