Name: Quince Honey
Ingredients: 3 large quinces, peeled and grated; 1 quart granulated sugar; 1 quart water

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 Honey

Ingredients

3 large quinces, peeled and grated
1 quart granulated sugar
1 quart water

Directions

Make the honey

Make a thin syrup by boiling granulated sugar and water together.
Once boiling, add the grated quinces.
Boil for 15 minutes.

Finish

Seal the mixture in jars.

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 fruit flavour and body that the honey is built around.
Granulated sugar: Sweetens the mixture and thickens it as it boils down into a syrup.

“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.