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
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the quinces
Pare the quinces and scoop out the core.
Place them in a preserving pan with water and cover closely.
Boil until soft and a fine red color.
Once cooled, transfer them to a syrup made with equal parts sugar and quinces.
The next day, boil them two or three times until clear, with the last boil lasting twelve minutes.
Make the syrup
Cut small quinces into quarters and place them in a saucepan with enough water to cover.
Boil quickly until the water is strongly flavored with quinces.
Strain the liquid through a flannel bag.
Boil one pint of the strained liquid with one pound of sugar until it becomes a rich syrup.
When cold, pour the syrup over the quinces.
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.
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Quince + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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 the flavor that the syrup and the cooked fruit carry.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and, when boiled down, thickens the syrup for preserving.
The step that matters
Boiling the quinces until clear over several days. Repeated boiling softens the fruit and lets sugar syrup slowly replace its water, so it turns clear and holds its shape. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave it cloudy or broken.
“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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