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Quince Marmalade

A preserve made by cooking sliced quinces with water and sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and slice the quinces.

  2. Place them in a kettle and add water until it covers the fruit by one inch.

  3. Cook until the quinces are soft, then strain through a colander.

Make the marmalade

  1. For each quart of cooked fruit, add a quart of sugar.

  2. Cook each quart for 15 to 20 minutes, or until it thickens and does not drop off the spoon.

Jar

  1. Transfer to glasses and cover with paper dipped in egg white.

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 body, natural pectin and tart flavor that set the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken as the mixture reduces and sets.

The step that matters

Cooking each quart until it thickens. Quinces are high in pectin, but the mixture needs enough sugar and reduction to reach a gel. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long can scorch the sugar and darken the flavor.

“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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