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Dessert

Quinces Preserved

Preserved quinces with sugar and water, boiled and jarred.

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 ↓

Quinces Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the quinces and cut them into quarters.

  2. Weigh the fruit and measure out 3 pounds of sugar and ½ cup of water.

Jar and cook

  1. Combine the sugar, water, and quinces in pint jars.

  2. Cover the jars with brown paper and place them in boiling water.

  3. Simmer gently for 3 hours.

Cool and use

  1. Allow the jars to cool, then seal them tightly.

  2. Mix a portion with apples when making pies.

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
Supply the fruit and natural pectin that helps the preserve set and gives its flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and thickens the preserve while helping it keep.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 3 hours. Gentle heat softens the quince slowly so it becomes tender and colors without breaking apart. A hard boil can crack jars and make the fruit fall apart or scorch.

“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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