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Quince and Apple Preserves

Preserves made from sweet apples and quinces cooked with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Quince and Apple Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Cook the apples separately in a little water.

  2. Cook the quinces separately in a little water, cooking them much longer.

  3. Add the sugar to the apples all at once to toughen them.

  4. When the fruit begins to soften, combine the apples and quinces and cook slowly.

  5. Once sufficiently cooked, remove the fruit.

Finish and store

  1. If the juice is not syrupy, boil it down until it is.

  2. Seal in cans or store in small, well-covered jars.

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

Sweet apples
Provide body and pectin-rich softness that help the preserve set.
Quinces
Add firm texture and a fragrant, tart flavour that deepens the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit, firms the apple pieces, and helps the juice thicken into syrup.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar to the apples all at once. Sugar added to fruit all at once firms the apple pieces so they hold their shape instead of turning mushy while the quinces cook longer. Adding it gradually or too late gives a softer, less defined texture.

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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