Name: Preserved Quince
Ingredients: 1 pound quince; 2 pounds sugar; water

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 Quince

Ingredients

1 pound quince
2 pounds sugar
water

Directions

Cook the quince

Cover the quince with water in a pot.
Boil for about 30 minutes.

Slice and sweeten

Cut the quince into very thin slices.
Add the sugar to the quince without boiling first.

Jar

Transfer the mixture into large jelly glasses.

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.

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

Quince: The main fruit, providing flavor and natural pectin that helps the preserve set.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps preserve the fruit.

“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.