Why didn't my smoke detectors go off?

I had just returned from a outing to find out that the whole house is full of smoke. Appartenly I had left the burner on under the pot of peach preserve that I was making earlier that day. A thick white smoke was bellowing from the pot. Took it out and put it out. But the house was so full of smoke, my eyes would burn everytime I went back in. Surprisingly none of the smoke detectors in the whole house had gone off ! I have at least 4 outside the kitche area (living room, foyer, up the staircase, and inside my office on first floor) all of them hardwired. All these areas were smokey, but no alarms went off. The one upstairs is from ADT and that should have caused ADT to call me about the smoke. The ones downstairs are different brand and relatively newer (2005). If there were only one smoke detector, I would suspect faulty detector, but 4. I am not even counting all the onesin bedrooms upstairs, which are battery operated. The bedrooms were smokey too but not as bad as downstairs. Could it be that ALL my detectors are bad? or are they not designed to detect smoke from burning sugar?!