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Dessert

Quince Preserves

A sweet preserve made by boiling quince with apples, sugar, and water until thickened.

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 Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple jelly

  1. In a pot, add golden pippin apples to boiling water and cover tightly.

  2. Boil quickly until the water turns into a thick jelly, then scald.

Make the preserve

  1. For each cup of apple jelly, add ½ pound of sugar and boil while skimming off any foam.

  2. Add whole quinces to the syrup and boil rapidly.

  3. For quinces cut in half, skim the syrup and test for jelling before removing from heat.

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. Sugar + quincetop 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

Quinces
Provide the fruit and flavour of the preserve, and their pectin helps it set as it cooks.
Golden pippin apples
Their pectin-rich jelly is added to the preserve to help it set.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps preserve it and firm its texture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Testing for jelling before removing from heat. Quince and apple pectin only set when the syrup reaches the right concentration. Removing the pot too early leaves a runny preserve, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

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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