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Dessert

Quince and Apple Butter

A sweet preserve made by boiling quinces and apples with sugar until thickened.

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 Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces and apples.

Cook

  1. Boil the quinces in a pot barely covered with water until soft.

  2. Add the apples to the pot and cook until they are tender.

  3. Stir in the sugar and boil slowly for several hours until the mixture thickens to your desired consistency.

  4. Stir occasionally, and more frequently towards the end to prevent burning.

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. Apple + sugartop 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).

Apple and sugar 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 flavor and pectin that helps the butter thicken as it cooks.
Sour apples
Add tartness and body, balancing the sweetness of the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the butter and helps it thicken into a spreadable texture as water evaporates.

The step that matters

Stir frequently near the end of cooking. Sugar-rich fruit mixtures scorch on the bottom of the pot as they thicken and water evaporates, so stirring more often prevents burning and a bitter taste.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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