Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Preserves

A preserved quince dish made by boiling quinces in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Quince and apple work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Quince Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Peel the quinces.

  2. Place the peeled quinces in cold water with a little lemon juice to prevent browning.

  3. Cut the quinces into halves or quarters as desired.

  4. Cover the quinces with cold water.

  5. Bring the water to a boil.

  6. Drain the juice.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Add 2 parts sugar and 1 part water to the pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam.

  4. Drop the quinces into the syrup.

  5. Cook slowly until they are fully preserved.

  6. Seal the preserves while hot.

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 + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Quince + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Quinces
Firm fruit that is cooked down into tender pieces and holds the preserve's body.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, with heat, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Lemon juice
Acidity that slows browning of the cut quince flesh.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until fully preserved. Quince needs long, gentle cooking in syrup for its flesh to soften and turn color. Boiling hard can break the pieces apart and leave the syrup cloudy or uneven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, sugar, apple. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesQuince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipes