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Dessert

Quince and Apple Preserves

Preserved quinces, optionally with apples, boiled in sugar syrup and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 and Apple Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare and core the quinces, leaving them whole or cutting them up as preferred.

  2. Boil the quinces in enough water to cover them until tender.

  3. Carefully remove the quinces and place them on a platter.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Add sugar to the boiling water to create a syrup.

  2. Return the quinces to the syrup and boil slowly until clear.

Add apples and jar

  1. To increase quantity, use half or two-thirds the weight of sweet apples, pare, quarter, and core them.

  2. After removing the quinces, add the apples to the syrup and boil until they look red, clear, and tender.

  3. Layer the quinces and apples in jars, alternating them, and cover with syrup.

  4. Place the preserves in jars and pour the syrup over them.

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

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

  3. Quince + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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
Provide the main fruit, whose pectin helps the preserves set and gives body.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and, with the fruit, helps them thicken and keep.
Sweet apples
Optional addition that increases the quantity of preserves while adding mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the quinces in the syrup until clear. Quinces need long, gentle cooking to become tender and translucent. Boiling too hard can break the fruit apart, while stopping too early leaves it firm and opaque.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits about as well
  3. Applethe original
  4. Plumfits less well

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

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