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Dessert

Quince Pre Ves

A sweet preserve made from quinces, sugar, apple jelly, and lemon juice, boiled in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Pre Ves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wipe quinces clean and cut lemons in half to extract juice.

  2. In boiling water, add whole golden pippin apples, uncut and unpeeled.

  3. Cover and boil quickly until water turns into a thick jelly, then scald.

Make the preserve

  1. Add 1/2 pound of sugar for every cup of apple jelly.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim it to remove foam.

  3. Add whole quinces to the syrup and boil rapidly.

  4. Halve some quinces and add them separately.

  5. Skim the syrup.

  6. Test for jellied consistency before removing from heat.

  7. Use 1 pound of quinces for every pound of sugar and jelly.

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

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

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and apple 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 flavor and the firm pectin-rich body of the preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the syrup thicken and set as it cooks.
Apple jelly
Adds natural pectin and body so the preserve sets into a jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and helps pectin set.

The step that matters

Test for jellied consistency before removing from heat. Pectin and sugar only set at the right concentration. Removing the preserve too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long can make it stiff or caramelized.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, sugar, apple. 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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