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To Preserve Whole or Half Quinces

A method for preserving whole or halved quinces in a sugar syrup that becomes a jelly.

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 Whole or Half Quinces

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pippin jelly

  1. Add sliced golden pippins to boiling water in a pot.

  2. Cover and boil quickly until the water turns into a thick jelly.

Scald and sweeten

  1. Scald the quinces.

  2. For every pint of pippin jelly, add 1 lb of sugar.

  3. Boil the mixture, skimming off any foam.

Cook the quinces

  1. Add whole quinces to the syrup and boil rapidly.

  2. For halved quinces, skim the syrup.

  3. Test the syrup for jellied consistency.

  4. Remove 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

Golden pippins
Their natural pectin helps the cooking liquid set into a jelly.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, with the pectin, helps it gel while also preserving the fruit.
Quinces
Firm fruit that holds its shape through long cooking and turns rosy as it cooks.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup for jellied consistency. Pectin and sugar set into a gel only at the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves the syrup runny, while cooking 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.

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