Skip to main content
Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A quince marmalade made by boiling quince, straining juice, simmering fruit, and cooking with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Quince and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,444 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Quince Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Quarter the quinces and boil them in enough water to nearly cover them until they begin to break.

  2. Strain the juice from the quinces and set aside.

  3. Cut out the hard stony parts from the cores of the remaining quinces.

  4. Simmer the quinces gently until perfectly tender, then press them with the juice through a coarse sieve.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a clean pan, combine the quince mixture with 3 lbs of powdered sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture until it forms almost a dry paste, stirring gently for about 30 minutes.

  3. For a richer marmalade, use equal weights of fruit and sugar and boil for a shorter time.

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 + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Quinces
Provide the pectin and tart flavour that give the marmalade its body and set.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens and, as it cooks down, thickens the fruit into a firm, spreadable paste.

The step that matters

Boiling down to a dry paste. Quince pectin sets only when enough water evaporates and sugar concentrates. Stirring gently keeps the paste from scorching on the bottom of the pan.

“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.

You might also like

Quince JellyQuince Jelly131 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes