Name: Quince Marmalade
Ingredients: 1 pound quinces; 1 pound sugar

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

1 pound quinces
1 pound sugar

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Boil the quinces until soft, then mash them with a spoon.

Cook and finish

Combine the mashed quinces and sugar in a pot and boil until well softened.
Strain the mixture through a coarse sieve.
Pour the strained marmalade into small jars for storage.

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.

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 character.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and helps it set into a thick, spreadable texture.

“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.