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Drink

Quince Wine

A fermented quince beverage made with water, sugar, lemon, yeast, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 336 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Quince Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wipe the quinces clean with a coarse cloth and grate them, avoiding the cores.

  2. Boil the quinces in 1 gallon of spring water for about 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture into an earthen pan over 2 pounds of sugar.

Add the flavourings

  1. Pare the peel off the lemons.

  2. Add the peeled lemons to the mixture.

  3. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into the mixture.

  4. Stir the mixture until it cools.

  5. Toast the bread until very brown.

  6. Rub yeast onto the toasted bread.

  7. Add the yeast-coated bread to the mixture.

  8. Cover the mixture and let it stand for 24 hours.

Cask and age

  1. Remove the toast and lemons from the mixture.

  2. Transfer the wine to a cask.

  3. Let the wine sit for 3 months before bottling.

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 + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Quince + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Quince + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Quinces
Provide the fruit flavour, aroma and pectin that give the wine its body.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and sets the wine's sweetness and alcohol level.
Yeast
Converts the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus aroma that balance the sweetness of the wine.

The step that matters

Toasting the bread until very brown. The toast carries the yeast into the mixture. Browning it fully builds roasted flavour, but burnt bread would add bitterness, so it should be deeply toasted, not charred.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar, bread):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, sugar, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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