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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from boiled quinces, juice, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 juice

  1. Quarter some inferior quinces and boil them in enough water until they begin to break.

  2. Strain the juice from the boiled quinces.

Make the marmalade

  1. Simmer the fresh quinces gently until perfectly tender, then press them with the juice through a coarse sieve.

  2. Put the mixture into a clean pan and boil until it forms almost a dry paste.

  3. Add 3/4 lb of powdered sugar for each pound of quinces and the prepared juice.

  4. Boil the marmalade for half an hour, stirring gently until it is bright in color.

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 pectin and tart flavor that give the marmalade its body and set.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Boiling down to a almost dry paste. Cooking the fruit pulp down until it is nearly dry concentrates the pectin and sugar so the marmalade can set firmly. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while overcooking can scorch it.

“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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