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Drink

Quince Juice

A sweetened quince juice made by boiling quince juice with powdered sugar and optionally flavored with orange flower oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Quince and orange work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 152 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Quince Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil and press the quinces to extract the juice.

  2. Combine 1 pint of quince juice with 1 pound of finely powdered sugar in a pot.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, then skim off any foam.

Bottle

  1. Pour the juice into bottles.

  2. For color, boil some oil of orange flowers in the juice 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 + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 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).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 juice
Provides the main fruit flavor and liquid base of the drink.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it keep as a preserved syrup.

The step that matters

Skim off the foam after boiling. Foam rises as the juice heats and contains impurities that would cloud the finished juice and can spoil it. Removing it keeps the liquid clear and stable.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quince, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against quince, 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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