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Dessert

Quince Oakes

A sweet made by boiling quinces, mixing with powdered sugar, and forming into small cakes that are baked or dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 Oakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quince paste

  1. Boil the quinces until soft and then rub them through a sieve.

  2. To a pint of quince juice, add ¾ pound of powdered loaf sugar and mix well.

  3. Heat the mixture until scalding hot, but do not allow it to boil.

Shape and dry

  1. Drop the mixture onto tins in the form of small cakes.

  2. Dry the cakes in a cool oven or before the fire.

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 pulp and juice that form the body and flavour of the cakes.
Powdered loaf sugar
Sweetens the mixture and, as it thickens on heating, helps it set into firm cakes.

The step that matters

Heat until scalding hot without boiling. Sugar dissolves fully in the hot juice and the mixture thickens as it cooks down. Boiling can scorch the sugar and cause it to set unevenly, so holding it just below the boil gives a smooth, cohesive mixture that holds its shape when dried.

“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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