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Preserves and Jellies

Preserves made from quinces cooked in sugar syrup until red.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Preserves and Jellies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, quarter, and core the quinces.

Make the preserves

  1. In a pot, combine 1 lb sugar with 2½ cups water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the quinces to the boiling syrup.

  3. Cook until the quinces turn red.

  4. Bottle the preserves.

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 flavor, and soften into tender pieces during long cooking in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and, dissolved in water, forms a syrup that helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Cook until the quinces turn red. Quinces are firm and starchy when raw. Long cooking in syrup softens their cell walls and pectin so the fruit becomes tender, and the color deepens as its pigments develop. Stopping too early leaves the fruit hard and pale.

“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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