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Dessert

Fruit Jellies

A preserved fruit confection made by boiling apples and quinces, clarifying the juice with sugar, and setting it into jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince 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 ↓

Fruit Jellies

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Place the cut apples and quinces in a pan and cover with water.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil without stirring.

  3. Cover and simmer until the fruit is soft.

  4. Transfer the fruit to a hair sieve to drain the juice.

  5. Let the juice sit overnight in deep vessels.

  6. Decant the juice from the sediment.

  7. Heat the juice to boiling.

  8. Pour the hot juice into glass jars and seal immediately.

Make the jelly

  1. Mix the juice with half its weight of sugar.

  2. Heat the mixture to boiling.

  3. Skim the mixture.

  4. Filter the mixture through a flannel bag.

  5. Boil the filtered juice until it reaches the jellying stage.

  6. Cool the boiled juice with cold water.

  7. Skim the cooled juice.

  8. Repeat boiling and cooling until clarified.

  9. Pour the clarified juice into warmed glasses.

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. Apple + quincetop 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

Apples
Provide pectin and natural fruit flavour that help the juice set into a jelly.
Quinces
Add high pectin and acidity, helping the juice gel and giving a distinctive aroma.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the fruit pectin and acid, helps the juice set firmly.

The step that matters

Boiling to the jellying stage. Boil the filtered juice only until it reaches the jellying stage. Too little boiling leaves it runny, while overboiling caramelises sugar and dulls flavour. Pectin, sugar and acid must reach the right concentration to gel.

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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