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Dessert

Quince Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking quinces with sugar and water until syrupy.

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. Pare and core the quinces, then cut them into halves or quarters.

  2. Soak the quinces overnight in enough cold water to cover them.

  3. In the morning, place the quinces in a kettle with the soaking water and cook gently until tender.

  4. Remove the fruit with a skimmer and weigh it.

Make the syrup

  1. For each pound of fruit, use one pound of sugar.

  2. Combine the fruit and sugar in the kettle with enough water to create a good syrup.

  3. Boil gently until the fruit is clear.

Jar the preserves

  1. Carefully remove the fruit with a skimmer and place it into jars.

  2. Fill the jars to the top with syrup.

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 turns clear, forming the body of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the fruit is clear. Cooking gently keeps the quince pieces whole while the sugar syrup slowly penetrates them; boiling hard can break the fruit apart and make the syrup cloudy.

“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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