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Dessert

Of Quinces

A dessert of boiled quinces simmered with sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, and syrup, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 199 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Of Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Quarter, peel, and core the quinces.

  2. Boil the quinces in water for 5 minutes, then drain them.

Cook and serve

  1. In a stewpan, combine quinces, sugar, lemon juice, water, and cinnamon. Simmer until cooked.

  2. Place quinces on a dish, pour syrup over them, and serve cold.

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 + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together199 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Quince + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Form the main body of the compote and soften into tender, fragrant fruit when simmered.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps form the syrup that coats the quinces.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the quinces keep their colour.

The step that matters

Simmer until cooked. Quinces are very firm and need slow, gentle simmering to become tender; cooking too hard can break the fruit apart, while stopping too early leaves it tough.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar, cinnamon, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, sugar, cinnamon, syrup. 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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