Name: Quince-pie
Ingredients: 1½ cups preserved quinces or fresh quinces, peeled and sliced; ¾ to 1 cup sugar; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 to 2 tablespoons cold water

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-pie

Ingredients

1½ cups preserved quinces or fresh quinces, peeled and sliced
¾ to 1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 to 2 tablespoons cold water

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Assemble and bake

Fill the pie crust with preserved quinces or fresh quinces that have been peeled and sliced.
In a bowl, combine the quinces with sugar, salt, and cold water, and mix well.
Pour the mixture into the pie crust.
Cover the pie and bake until golden.

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.

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 main fruit filling and its flavor and texture once cooked.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps draw moisture from the quinces to form a syrup.
Cold water: Adds a little moisture to help the filling come together.

“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.