Skip to main content
Dessert

Delicious Quince Jelly

A sweet jelly made from quince and apple, sweetened with sugar and flavored with rose geranium.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Delicious Quince Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Place chopped quinces and apples in a preserving pan and cover with water.

  2. Cover the pan and simmer for several hours.

  3. Drain the mixture in a colander overnight.

  4. The next morning, strain the juice through a jelly bag.

Make the jelly

  1. Measure the juice and add an equal amount of sugar, then boil until it turns pink.

  2. Test the consistency on a saucer; when thickened, dip the geranium sprigs in the jelly and swirl them.

  3. Remove the jelly from heat and pour it into glasses.

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. Rose + geraniumtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-rose oxide (green, flower).

  3. Quince + rosetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

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

  5. Apple + geraniumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together13 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Quinces
Provide natural pectin and tart flavour that help the jelly set.
Apples
Add additional pectin, helping the juice gel firmly when cooked with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, at high concentration, helps it set by binding water.

The step that matters

Testing the set on a saucer. Boiling must stop once the jelly thickens. Overcooking can make it stiff and dull, while undercooking leaves it runny, so a cold saucer test shows when it has reached setting point.

Swap the quince

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Quincethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, rose, geranium, 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes