Name: Quince Honey
Ingredients: 3 pounds sugar; ½ pint boiling water; 2 quinces; ½ teaspoon pulverized alum

Why it works: Sugar and quince 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 Honey

Ingredients

3 pounds sugar
½ pint boiling water
2 quinces
½ teaspoon pulverized alum

Directions

Boil the sugar and water together for 5 minutes.
Add the quinces and boil for an additional 5 minutes.
Just before removing from heat, stir in the pulverized alum.

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.

Sugar + quincetop 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 that becomes tender and candied in the sugar syrup.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and, in a syrup, preserves it by drawing out water.
Alum: Helps keep the quince pieces firm and holds their color during cooking.

“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.