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Dessert

Grape and Quince Jelly

A jelly made from grapes and quinces sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Grape and quince work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 96 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Grape and Quince Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Cut the quinces, removing all seeds, and cook them for 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the cooked quinces and grapes together to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Place the juice on the stove and bring it to a boil, skimming off any scum that forms for 15 minutes.

  2. Preheat the oven and heat the sugar.

  3. Add 1 pound of sugar for every pint of juice and boil for 10 minutes until ready for jars.

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. Grape + quincetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together96 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Quinces
Their natural pectin and acidity help the juice set into a firm jelly.
Grapes
Supply most of the juice and the main fruit flavor of the jelly.
Sugar
Helps the jelly set and preserves it, while adding sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar. Sugar, pectin and acid only set when the mixture is concentrated by boiling. Stopping too early leaves the jelly runny, while boiling too long can make it dark and stiff.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Grapethe 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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