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To Preserve Quinces

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and tea work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. 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 ½ cup water and a little sugar between them.

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

Make the marmalade

  1. Combine the fruit syrup and 1 quart of quince juice in a preserving pan.

  2. Boil the mixture until the marmalade is complete.

  3. Break lumps of fruit with a preserving ladle.

Extract the juices

  1. Stew quinces in a jar to obtain juice.

  2. Squeeze the stew through cheesecloth dipped in boiling water.

  3. Boil sliced pippins in 2 quarts of water until it becomes a thick jelly.

Finish the preserve

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar for every pint of pippin jelly, then boil the mixture and skim clear.

  2. Add whole quinces to the syrup.

  3. Boil fast, skimming as needed.

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 + teatop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  2. Sugar + quincetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + teatop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it set by binding water and thickening the syrup.
Quince juice
Adds fruit flavour and natural pectin that helps the preserve thicken.
Pippins
Provide pectin in the boiled jelly, which gives the preserve its body.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it thickens. Pectin and sugar only set when the mixture reaches the right concentration. Undercooking leaves the preserve runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or caramelised.

Swap the quince

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, tea):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, tea. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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