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Dessert

Quince and Apple Preserve

A preserve made from quinces and optional apples boiled 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 the quinces.

  2. Core the quinces.

  3. Leave them whole or cut them into pieces.

Cook the quinces in syrup

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

  2. Carefully remove the quinces.

  3. Place them on a platter.

  4. Add the sugar to the water used for boiling.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Return the quinces to the syrup.

  7. Boil slowly until clear.

  8. Place the quinces in jars.

  9. Pour the syrup over them.

Add the apples

  1. Use half to two-thirds the weight of sweet apples.

  2. Pare the apples.

  3. Quarter the apples.

  4. Core the apples.

  5. Add the apples to the syrup.

  6. Boil until red, clear, and tender.

  7. Layer the quinces and apples alternately in a jar.

  8. Cover with syrup.

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
Firm fruit that holds its shape through long cooking and gives the preserve its main flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it while forming the syrup.
Sweet apples
Add sweetness and body, and their pectin helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until clear. A gentle simmer lets the syrup penetrate the fruit and keeps the pieces whole and tender. A hard, fast boil breaks the quinces apart and can make the syrup cloudy.

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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