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Dessert

Quince Preserves

A sweet preserve made by boiling quinces with sugar and water, then layering and reboiling until thick.

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 syrup

  1. Boil quinces, sugar, and water together for 15 minutes.

  2. Place the mixture in a jar and let it stand for 12 hours.

Thicken and store

  1. Pour the syrup into a vessel and boil it for 10 minutes.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over the quinces again.

  3. Let it stand for another 12 hours.

  4. Pour out the syrup again and boil it until thick.

  5. Pour the thick syrup over the quinces once more.

  6. Cover the jar well and store it in a cool, dry place.

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 that softens and flavours the preserve as it steeps in the syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled down, thickens the syrup through concentration.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until thick. Repeated boiling concentrates the sugar, so the syrup thickens and the preserve keeps better. Stopping too early leaves it thin and more prone to spoiling.

“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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