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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from ripe quinces, sugar, and water, cooked until jelly-like.

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 quinces

  1. Gather fully ripe quinces, then pare, quarter, and core them.

  2. Boil the skins with an equal amount of water to the weight of the quinces until soft.

  3. Mash the skins and strain the water, then add it to the quinces.

  4. Boil the quinces until soft enough to mash fine, then rub through a sieve.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the same weight of sugar to the pulp and stir together.

  2. Cook over gentle heat until it falls from a spoon like jelly; test in a saucer.

  3. If it jellies when cold, pour into pots or tumblers and secure as directed for 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 + 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 pectin and tart flavour that give the marmalade its set and character.
Sugar
Sweetens the pulp and helps the mixture thicken into a jelly-like set.
Water
Extracts pectin from the skins and softens the fruit so it can be mashed and strained.

The step that matters

Testing the set on a saucer. Quince pulp must be cooked until it sets, but overcooking can make it stiff and dull, while undercooking leaves it runny. A cold saucer test shows whether the pectin has gelled enough, since the mixture thickens further as it cools.

“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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