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To Preserve Quinces

A method for preserving quinces by boiling them with apple jelly and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 Quinces

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pippin jelly

  1. In a pot, bring 2 quarts of water to a boil.

  2. Add the sliced pippins and boil covered until the water becomes thick jelly.

Preserve the quinces

  1. Scald the quinces in the boiling water.

  2. For every pint of pippin jelly, add 1 pound of sugar and boil, skimming off any foam.

  3. Add whole quinces to the syrup and boil quickly, or add halved quinces separately.

  4. Test the syrup for jelling by placing a small amount in a glass 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

Fair golden pippins
Their pectin turns the cooking liquid into a jelly that helps the syrup set.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it and thicken the syrup.
Quinces
Firm fruit that absorbs the syrup and becomes tender as it simmers.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup for jelling. Testing a small sample in a glass shows whether the syrup has reached a set. Pectin and sugar must reach the right concentration to gel; too little cooking leaves it runny, too much can turn it stiff. Check before removing from heat.

“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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