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Dessert

Quince Jam or Marmalade

A quince and tart apple preserve made by cooking, draining, sweetening, and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 Jam or Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Rub the rind off the quinces and cut them into thin pieces, including skins and cores.

  2. Peel and quarter a few tart apples, then add them to the quinces.

  3. Cover the mixture with cold water and cook until soft.

Strain and sweeten

  1. Pour the mixture into a jelly bag and let it drain overnight.

  2. Measure the juice and add one bowlful of sugar for every bowlful of juice.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture rapidly for fifteen minutes.

  2. Pour the mixture into jars to cool.

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 flavour and the natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Tart apples
Add extra pectin and acidity to help the marmalade gel.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set and keep its shape when cooled.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture rapidly for fifteen minutes. Rapid boiling concentrates the juice and sugar so the pectin can form a gel. Too little boiling leaves a runny set, while overcooking can darken the colour and dull the flavour.

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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