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Dessert

Preserved Fruits

A sweet preserve made by baking quinces with sugar and water, then boiling the mixture into marmalade.

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

Preserved Fruits

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare and quarter the quinces.

  2. Layer the quinces in a stone jar, sprinkling sugar between each layer.

  3. Add 1 teacup of water to the jar and cover it tightly.

Bake the quinces

  1. Place the jar in a cool oven and bake until the quinces are soft and red.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a separate pot, boil 4 lbs of sugar with 1 quart of water, skimming it well.

  2. Once the quinces are soft, add them and the juice from the jar to the syrup.

  3. Boil the mixture until the marmalade is smooth, breaking up any lumps with a wooden spoon.

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 + sugartop 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

Quinces
Provide the fruit body and pectin that thickens the marmalade as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, once boiled, helps the marmalade set into a thick spread.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture until smooth. Quince pectin needs sustained boiling with sugar to set. Stop too early and the marmalade stays runny; boil too long and it can scorch or turn overly dark.

“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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