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Quince Marmalade

A preserve made by cooking quince with sugar and water until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,444 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Quince Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quince

  1. Cut the quince into pieces, keeping the skins and cores.

  2. Boil the quince in enough water to cover it until tender.

  3. Rub the cooked quince through a sieve.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the sugar to the quince puree.

  2. Boil the mixture until it turns a reddish color, about 1 hour.

  3. Pour the hot mixture into molds or pans.

  4. Let it cool to form a smooth surface.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Quince
Provides the fruit body and natural pectin that lets the marmalade set firm.
Sugar
Sweetens the puree and, once boiled down, helps it thicken and set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture until it turns reddish. Cooking long enough lets the sugar concentrate and the pectin gel, so the marmalade sets. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while overcooking can scorch the sugar and make it bitter.

“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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