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Dessert

Baked Quinces

A dessert of baked quinces served cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince 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 ↓

Baked Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Core the apple-quinces of uniform size.

  2. Place the coreless quinces in a baking pan and put the cores in the pan.

  3. Fill the spaces left by the cores with sugar.

  4. Add boiling water to the pan until it reaches the height of the quinces.

  5. Cover the pan with an inverted pan.

Bake

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  2. Uncover the pan.

  3. Continue baking until the quinces are tender, about 1 hour or more.

  4. Dish the quinces.

Make the syrup and serve

  1. Set the pan over the fire and boil briskly for a few minutes.

  2. Add more sugar if not sweet enough.

  3. Strain the syrup over the fruit.

  4. Set the syrup aside to cool.

  5. Serve cold with cream.

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. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar 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

Apple-quinces
Firm fruit that softens into a tender, cooked texture during slow baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, once dissolved in the cooking liquid, body to the syrup.
Boiling water
Creates steam and a surrounding liquid that cooks the fruit gently and forms the syrup.

The step that matters

Baking until fully tender. Raw quinces are hard because their fibres and starches are dense. Long, moist heat breaks these down, so removing the pan early leaves the fruit firm and grainy.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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