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Dessert

Apples and Quinces

A preserve made by stewing apples and quinces in a clarified sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and apple 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 ↓

Apples and Quinces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces.

  2. Place the quinces in clear water in a preserving kettle or stew pan.

  3. Stew the quinces until they can be pierced with a straw.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a strong syrup with the sugar and water.

  2. Clarify the syrup.

Cook and can

  1. Add the quinces and the pared, cored, and quartered apples to the syrup.

  2. Stew until the fruit is done.

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 + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 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).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
Firm fruit that holds its shape and gives the preserve its distinctive flavor and color.
Apples
Add body and mild sweetness, and pectin that helps the preserve set.
Fine white sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Stew the quinces in water before adding them to the syrup. Raw quince is very hard and takes far longer to become tender than apple. Pre-cooking it until a straw pierces it ensures the fruit softens evenly with the apples instead of staying firm or breaking down unevenly.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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