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Dessert

Quince Jelly

A jelly made from ripe orange quinces, water, and cane sugar.

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

Why it works: Orange and quince work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 152 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Quince Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash and rub the quinces with a cloth.

  2. Use the rind and hard parts of the fruit for the jelly, removing seeds and cores.

  3. Cover the fruit with water and simmer gently until tender, then drain.

Make the jelly

  1. Measure three pints of juice into a preserving pan and boil for fifteen minutes.

  2. Add ½ lb. of cane sugar to the juice and stir until dissolved.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Orange + quincetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Quince + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
Provide the fruit flavour and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Cane sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. 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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