Skip to main content
Dessert

To Preserve Whole or Half Quinces

A method for preserving whole or halved quinces in a sweet pippin jelly and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and quince 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 Whole or Half Quinces

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pippin jelly

  1. Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add sliced pippins, cover, and boil until the water becomes a thick jelly.

Cook the quinces

  1. Scald the quinces.

  2. For every pint of pippin jelly, add 1 pound of sugar and boil, skimming it clear.

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

  4. Add halved quinces separately.

  5. Test the syrup for jelling 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. Sugar + quincetop 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 and its firm flesh, which holds shape and gives the preserve its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it set into a thick, jelly-like syrup.
Pippins
Release natural pectin as they boil, which helps the syrup thicken and jell.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup for jelling. Pectin and sugar set only at the right concentration. Removing the syrup from heat too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long can make it stiff.

“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.

You might also like

Quince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes