Name: Quince Jelly
Ingredients: 1 gallon quinces; 1 pint water; 1 lb sugar

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 Jelly

Ingredients

1 gallon quinces
1 pint water
1 lb sugar

Directions

Prepare the quinces

Remove the core and skins from the quinces.
Add 1 pint of water to the quinces and boil until soft.
Strain the mixture to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

Weigh the juice and boil it for 20 minutes.
For every pound of juice, add 1 pound of sugar and boil for an additional 15 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

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

Quinces: Provide the fruit pectin and tart flavour that give the jelly its body and taste.
Sugar: Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and concentrating the mixture.

“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.