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Dessert

Quince Cakes

A sweet confection made by boiling quince, extracting juice, sweetening, and baking into small cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quince paste

  1. Boil the quinces until soft.

  2. Rub the quinces through a sieve to extract the juice.

  3. For each pint of juice, add ¾ pound of powdered loaf sugar and mix well.

  4. Heat the mixture until scalding hot, but do not let it boil.

Shape and dry

  1. Drop the mixture onto tins in the shape of small cakes.

  2. Dry the cakes in a cool oven or before the fire.

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 pulp and juice that form the body of the cakes.
Powdered loaf sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps it set firm as it dries.

The step that matters

Heat until scalding hot without boiling. Heating the mixture to scalding hot dissolves the sugar fully and thickens the fruit. Boiling can scorch the sugar and make the mixture grainy or sticky, so it should be stopped at scalding.

“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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