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Dessert

Quince Preserve

A preserve made from quince, sugar, and sour apple syrup, cooked until desired color.

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 Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and core the quince.

  2. Make syrup from sour apples, using the same method as for jelly.

Cook

  1. Combine ½ pint of syrup with 1 pound of sugar in a pot and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the quince to the boiling syrup and cook until the fruit reaches the desired color.

  3. Optionally, add one-third of either apples or hard pears, cut the same way, for a milder preserve.

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 + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  5. Quince + syruptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Golden quince
Provides the main fruit body and flavor of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it set into a thick, spreadable texture.
Sour apple syrup
Adds acidity and pectin to help the preserve gel.

The step that matters

Cooking the quince in boiling syrup. Cooking until the fruit reaches the desired color takes judgment, since overcooking softens the fruit and can make it break down unevenly. Keeping the syrup at a steady boil helps the sugar concentrate and the fruit soften and colour evenly.

Swap the quince

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple, syrup. 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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