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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from quinces, sugar, and water, simmered until fruit softens and turns red.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and quarter the quinces. Weigh an equal quantity of sugar.

  2. In a pot, combine 4 pounds of sugar with 1 quart of water, boil, and skim.

Cook the quinces

  1. Place the quinces in a stone jar with ½ cup of water at the bottom, layering with a little sugar in between. Cover the jar tightly and place it in a cool oven or on a stove until the quinces soften and turn red.

Make the marmalade

  1. Pour the fruit syrup and 1 quart of quince juice into a preserving pan and boil until the marmalade is ready, breaking up any lumps of fruit with a ladle.

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 + 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 pectin-rich juice that gives the marmalade its set and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, helps it thicken and preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Cooking the quinces until they soften and turn red. Quinces are firm and tart when raw, and they need slow, gentle heat to soften fully and release their juice and colour. Stopping early leaves hard pieces and a weak flavour in the finished marmalade.

“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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