Name: Marmalade
Ingredients: 2 pounds quinces; ¾ pound sugar; 1 pint spring water

Marmalade

A quince marmalade made by boiling quinces with sugar and spring water, then draining, bruising, and reboiling before jar storage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients

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 ↓

Marmalade

Ingredients

2 pounds quinces
¾ pound sugar
1 pint spring water

Directions

Cook the quinces

Combine quinces, sugar, and spring water in a pot.
Boil until the quinces are tender.
Drain the liquid and bruise the quinces.
Return the quinces to the pot with the liquid.

Finish and store

Boil for 45 minutes.
Pour into 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 fruit body and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar: Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks down.

“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.