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Dessert

Quince and Apple Preserves

A preserve made by boiling quinces and optional apples in sugar syrup 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 Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quinces

  1. Pare and core the quinces, leaving them whole or cutting them up as preferred.

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

  3. Carefully remove the quinces and place them on a platter.

Make the syrup

  1. Add sugar to the boiling water to create syrup.

  2. Return the quinces to the pot and boil slowly until clear.

Add apples and jar

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

  2. Pare, quarter, and core the apples.

  3. Add the apples to the syrup.

  4. Boil until they are tender and begin to look red and clear.

  5. Layer the quinces and apples in jars alternately and cover with syrup.

  6. Place the quinces in jars and pour the syrup over them.

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 softens when boiled, becoming tender and turning clear and rosy in syrup.
Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.
Sweet apples
Adds bulk and mild sweetness, stretching the quantity of quince preserves.

The step that matters

Boiling the quinces slowly in the syrup until clear. Quinces are hard and need long, gentle cooking to become tender. Boiling too hard can break the fruit apart, while stopping too early leaves it firm and opaque. Slow simmering lets the sugar syrup penetrate the fruit gradually.

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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