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To Preserve Quinces

A method for preserving quinces by boiling them with sugar and quince juice to make marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

To Preserve Quinces

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Place quinces in a stone jar with water and pack with sugar.

  2. Cover the jar and set it in a cool oven until the quinces turn red.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a preserving pan, combine fruit syrup and quince juice.

  2. Boil the mixture until the marmalade is complete, breaking lumps with a ladle.

  3. For whole or half quinces, boil slices of golden pippins in boiling water until it becomes a thick jelly.

  4. Add 1 pound of sugar for every pint of pippin-jelly.

  5. Boil the pippin-jelly mixture.

  6. Skim the mixture to make it clear.

  7. Add whole quinces to the syrup and boil fast.

  8. For halved quinces, skim and test the syrup for jelliness before removing from heat.

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 natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, helps it thicken into a set jelly.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup for jelliness before removing from heat. Quinces are high in pectin, but the syrup must reach the concentration needed to gel. Removing it too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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