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Dessert

Quince Sweetmeat

A sweet confection made from quince pulp, sugar, and optional lemon peel or barberry juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 336 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Quince Sweetmeat

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Peel the quinces and remove the cores.

  2. Boil the quinces in water until soft.

  3. Pass the hot quinces through a sieve to obtain pulp.

Make the paste

  1. For every pound of quince pulp, mix with an equal weight of sugar and a little water to make a thick syrup.

  2. Combine the syrup with the quince pulp while hot.

  3. Mix half a pound of fine sugar with the quince mixture.

  4. Optionally, add chopped lemon-peel or color with barberry juice.

Shape and dry

  1. Roll out the paste, using the remaining sugar to coat it.

  2. Dry the sweetmeat in a cool oven.

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 + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 pulp that sets into the firm, sliceable body of the sweetmeat.
Sugar
Sweetens the pulp and, as it thickens, helps the paste set firm and keep its shape.

The step that matters

Passing the hot quinces through a sieve. Quince pulp must be smooth and well worked while hot, since its pectin sets as it cools. Pressing it through while hot yields a fine, even pulp that thickens evenly when the sugar is added.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, 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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