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Dessert

Quince Cream

A dessert made by roasting quinces, boiling them in cream with ginger, and sweetening with loaf sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and ginger work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 62 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Quince Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Roast the quinces.

  2. Remove the cores.

  3. Slice them thinly.

Make the cream

  1. Boil the sliced quinces in 1 pint of cream with ginger.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Sweeten with loaf sugar to taste.

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 + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together62 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Quince + creamtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together203 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Ripe quinces
Provide the main fruit flavour and body that the cream is built around.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished cream a smooth, silky texture.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the tart flavour of the quinces.

The step that matters

Straining the mixture. Cooked quince contains fibrous pulp and small particles that keep the cream grainy unless they are strained out. Straining removes them, leaving a smooth texture.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, ginger, 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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