Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Quinces

A preserved quince dish made by cooking quinces in a sugar syrup with cloves.

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

Why it works: Clove and quince match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 164 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Preserved Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, quarter, and core the quinces.

  2. Steam the quinces while preparing the syrup.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a pot, combine 2 cups water, 1 lb sugar, and 3 or 4 whole cloves.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil.

  3. Add the quinces to the syrup and cook until they turn red.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the preserved quinces.

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. Clove + quincetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + quincetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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
Main fruit; slow cooking in syrup softens its firm flesh and turns it red.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, in syrup, helps preserve it by drawing out water.
Cloves
Adds warm, spiced aroma to the syrup and the fruit.

The step that matters

Cooking the quinces in the syrup until they turn red. Raw quinces are hard and tart, and they soften and redden only through sustained simmering in the syrup. Stopping too early leaves them firm, while cooking too long can make them break down and turn mushy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, quince):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

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

You might also like

Quince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes