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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from boiled quince, sugar, and juice.

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

Cook the quinces

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the quinces.

  2. Boil the quinces in enough water to nearly cover them until they begin to break.

  3. Strain the juice from the quinces.

Make the marmalade

  1. For the marmalade, use ½ cup of juice for each pound of fresh quinces.

  2. Cut out the hard parts around the cores of the quinces.

  3. Simmer the quinces gently until perfectly tender.

  4. Press the quinces and juice through a coarse sieve into a clean pan.

  5. Boil the mixture until it forms almost a dry paste.

  6. Add ¾ pound of sugar for each pound of quinces and ½ cup of juice.

  7. Boil the marmalade for 30 minutes, stirring gently without ceasing.

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
Their natural pectin helps the marmalade thicken and set as it cooks down.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the marmalade thicken into a spreadable set.

The step that matters

Boiling for 30 minutes while stirring without ceasing. The mixture is thick and sugar-rich, so it can scorch and stick to the bottom of the pan. Constant gentle stirring keeps heat even and prevents burnt patches that spoil the flavour and colour.

“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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