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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from quinces, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pave and quarter the quinces.

  2. Weigh an equal quantity of sugar (4 pounds).

  3. Combine 4 pounds of sugar with 1 quart of water in a pot, boil, and skim the surface.

Soften the quinces

  1. Place the quinces in a stone jar with 1 teacup of water at the bottom, packing them with a little sugar in between.

  2. Cover the jar tightly and place it in a cool oven or on a stove to soften until the quinces turn red.

Boil and finish

  1. Pour the fruit syrup and 1 quart of quince juice into a preserving pan and boil together.

  2. Break up the lumps of fruit with a preserving ladle while boiling.

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
Provide the fruit body and natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps preserve it and thicken it as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cover the jar tightly and soften the quinces slowly. Gentle, covered heat softens the fruit evenly and turns it red without scorching or drying it. Fast or uncovered heat can burn the sugar and fruit, and insufficient softening leaves the quince firm and slows setting.

“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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