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Dessert

Quince and Apple Jam

A jam made from quince and apple, sweetened with sugar and water, cooked until clear.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, core, and slice the quinces and apples, then weigh the fruits.

  2. For every pound of fruit, use ¾ cup of sugar.

Cook and jar

  1. Steam the fruit until tender.

  2. Make a syrup by dissolving the sugar in just enough water.

  3. Add the fruit to the syrup and simmer until it looks clear.

  4. Remove the fruit to sterilized jars.

  5. If necessary, boil down the syrup and pour it over the fruit.

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. 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

Quinces
Provide the main fruit flavour and pectin that helps the jam set.
Sweet juicy apples
Add bulk, sweetness and extra pectin to help the jam thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps preserve it by binding water.

The step that matters

Simmer the fruit in the syrup until it looks clear. Simmering lets the fruit absorb the syrup slowly, so it turns clear and firm. Boiling too hard can break the pieces apart and cloud the jam.

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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