Skip to main content
Dessert

To Preserve Whole or Half Quinces

A method for preserving whole or half quinces in a sugar syrup jelly.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pippin jelly

  1. Boil the sliced pippins in boiling water until it becomes a thick jelly.

Prepare the quinces

  1. Scald the quinces.

Make the syrup and cook the quinces

  1. For every pint of pippin-jelly, add 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture, skimming it clear.

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

  4. 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. 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
The main fruit; it cooks until tender and firm while holding its shape in the syrup.
Pippins
Provides pectin, the natural setting agent that thickens the jelly used to preserve the fruit.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit while it thickens into a set syrup.

The step that matters

Test the syrup for jelliness before removing from heat. Pectin sets only at the right sugar and concentration. Removing the syrup too early leaves it runny, while cooking it too long makes it stiff and 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.

You might also like

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