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Apple and Quince Jams

A jam made from apples or quinces boiled with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple and Quince Jams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare and core the apples or quinces, then cut them into pieces.

  2. Place the fruit in a pan and add enough water to cover them.

  3. Boil until reduced to a pulp.

  4. Pass the pulp through a sieve.

Make the jam

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pound of pulp.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring until thick and jelly-like.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Transfer to pots.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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 or quinces
Provide the fruit pulp that forms the body of the jam.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Cooking the pulp with sugar until thick. Sugar and pectin set the jam only when enough water has cooked off. Stopping too early leaves a runny jam, while cooking too long can scorch the sugar and darken the flavour.

“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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