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Dessert

Ouincb Preserves

A preserve made from quince, sweet apples, 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 apple work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Ouincb Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, quarter, and core the fruit, then cut each quarter into three slices.

  2. Put the fruit into enough hot water to cover and boil until tender but not too soft.

  3. Skim out the fruit and place it into cans.

Make the syrup and fill the cans

  1. Make a thick syrup using 1 cup of sugar for every cup of the boiling water.

  2. When the syrup is boiling, skim it clear and fill the cans with it.

  3. Let the cans stand for at least five minutes before sealing, allowing for a second filling with syrup if needed.

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 + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Quince
Provides the main fruit, firm when cooked and gives the preserve its flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out water.
Sweet apples
Adds sweetness and natural pectin that helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boil the fruit until tender but not too soft. Quince needs enough heat to soften, but overcooking breaks the pieces down into mush and they lose their shape in the syrup. Stop when a knife pierces the fruit with slight resistance.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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