Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Tart

A quince tart made with sugar, water, sliced quinces, almonds, citron, lemon peel and juice, finished with a lemon-sugar glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Quince and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 69 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Quince Tart

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the quince marmalade

  1. Combine 1 pound of sugar and 1 pint of water in a brass pan and boil until it forms a syrup.

  2. Add 1 pound of sliced quinces and boil until it becomes a marmalade, stirring constantly.

  3. Stir in 6 ounces of chopped almonds, 2 ounces of chopped citron, the peel of 2 lemons, and the juice of the lemons; boil briefly.

Bake and finish

  1. Cover a baking plate with wafer paper, pour the mixture over it, and smooth it out.

  2. Once baked, beat the juice of 2 lemons with pounded sugar until it is white like ice; cover the tart with this mixture and let it dry in a cool oven.

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 + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together69 recipes

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

  2. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 body and pectin that thickens the mixture into a marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart and, boiled into syrup, helps set the marmalade as it cooks down.
Almonds
Add body and a rich, nutty texture to the marmalade filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet fruit and supports the set of the marmalade.

The step that matters

Boiling the quince marmalade while stirring constantly. Quince is dense and sugar-heavy mixtures scorch easily on the base of a pan. Constant stirring keeps the mass from burning and lets the fruit break down evenly into a spreadable marmalade.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesQuince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes