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Quince Preserves

Preserves made by cooking peeled quinces with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Quince Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Peel and core the quinces.

  2. Boil the quinces in water until very tender.

Make the syrup

  1. In a separate pot, make a syrup by combining 4 cups of sugar with 4 cups of water.

  2. Remove any scum from the syrup.

Simmer in syrup

  1. Boil the tender quinces in the syrup for 30 minutes.

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 body and pectin that give the preserve its body and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws water out of the fruit, helping it preserve and turn glossy.

The step that matters

Boil the quinces in water until very tender. Quinces are hard and firm when raw. Softening them fully before adding sugar matters because sugar tends to toughen fruit tissue, so the quinces may stay firm if they are not tender first.

“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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