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Dessert

Apple, Crab-apple, Peach, and Quince Jelly

A jelly made from apples, crab-apples, peaches, quinces, water, sugar, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apple, Crab-apple, Peach, and Quince Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash and cut the fruits into pieces, removing cores and defective parts.

  2. Add enough water to cover the fruit and boil gently until tender.

Extract the juice

  1. Pour the mixture into a jelly bag and hang to drain overnight.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of juice, add a pint of sugar, or if the juice is watery, use three-fourths of a pint of sugar per pint of juice.

  2. Optionally, add the juice of one lemon for every two pints of crab-apple juice.

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. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apple + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

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

  3. Peach + quincetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  5. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide pectin and tartness that help the jelly set.
Crab-apples
Add natural pectin and acidity that help the jelly set.
Quinces
Add natural pectin that helps the juice gel.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it set into a firm gel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that supports pectin gelling and brightens the flavor.

The step that matters

Draining the juice overnight. Squeezing the jelly bag forces cloudy particles through, making the jelly cloudy. Letting it drip undisturbed keeps the juice clear. Measure the juice before adding sugar, since the sugar ratio depends on the volume collected.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, crab, peach, quince, sugar):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, crab, peach, quince, 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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