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Dessert

Quince and Apple Preserve

A preserve made by boiling quinces and optional sweet apples in sugar syrup.

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

Quince and Apple Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare and core the quinces, leaving them whole or cutting them into pieces.

  2. Boil the quinces in enough water to cover them until tender.

  3. Carefully remove the quinces and place them on a platter.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Add the sugar to the water used for boiling and bring to a boil.

  2. Return the quinces to the syrup and boil slowly until clear.

Add apples and jar

  1. To increase quantity, use half to two-thirds the weight of sweet apples, pare, quarter, and core them.

  2. After removing the quinces, add the apples to the syrup and boil until red, clear, and tender.

  3. Layer the quinces and apples alternately in a jar and cover with syrup.

  4. Place the quinces in jars and pour the syrup over them.

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 + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + appletop 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).

Sugar and apple 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

Quinces
Provide the main fruit body and firm texture, turning tender and clear when simmered in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved into the boiling water, forms the syrup that preserves it.
Sweet apples
Optional extra fruit that stretches the batch and adds mild sweetness and softer texture.

The step that matters

Boil the quinces slowly in the syrup until clear. Quinces are firm and need gentle, prolonged simmering in sugar syrup to soften and turn translucent; rushing with a hard boil can break the fruit apart and leave it tough.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits about as well
  3. Applethe original
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, 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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