Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Quinces

A pickled quince dish made by boiling, simmering in sugar, vinegar, cloves, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, quarter, and core the quinces.

  2. Boil the quinces in just enough water to cover them for 15 minutes, cooking gently.

Pickle and seal

  1. Drain the quinces and skim them into the syrup made of sugar, vinegar, and spices, which should be heated to a simmer.

  2. Let the quinces cook gently in the syrup for 5 minutes, then seal them up.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Quince + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Quince + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together199 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Form the fruit body, firming during cooking and holding their shape in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, with the vinegar, helps preserve it in the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boil the quinces in just enough water to cover them. Quinces are very firm and need gentle, covered-level simmering to soften evenly; a hard boil can break the fruit apart before it turns tender.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Quincethe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, clove, cinnamon. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes