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Quince Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling quince pieces with juice and sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces, then boil them in enough water to nearly cover them until they begin to break.

  2. Strain the juice from the quinces and set aside.

Cook the quince

  1. Simmer the remaining quince pieces gently until perfectly tender, then press them with the juice through a coarse sieve.

  2. In a clean pan, combine the quince mixture and boil until it forms almost a dry paste.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add 3/4 lb of powdered sugar for each pound of quinces and the half pint of juice, then boil for 30 minutes, stirring continuously.

  2. For a richer marmalade, use equal weights of fruit and sugar and boil for a shorter time.

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
Supply pectin and tart flavour that help the marmalade set.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it thickens, helps it set firm.
Quince juice
Adds extra pectin and moisture, helping the fruit cook down to a set mass.

The step that matters

Boiling with the sugar. Once sugar is added, the mixture can scorch on the bottom of the pan, so constant stirring is needed. The sugar and pectin must also cook long enough together to thicken into a set marmalade.

“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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