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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from peeled, quartered quinces simmered in water, mashed, and cooked with clarified 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 quinces

  1. Take perfectly ripe quinces, peel, and cut them into quarters, then remove the cores.

  2. Place the quinces in a pot with enough spring water to nearly cover them. Cover and simmer gently until soft and red.

  3. Mash the quinces and strain them through a fine sieve.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a pan over low heat, combine the strained quinces with an equal weight of thick clarified sugar.

  2. Boil for one hour, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon to prevent sticking.

Pot and cool

  1. Pour the mixture into pots and let it cool before sealing.

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
Supply the fruit body and natural pectin that help the marmalade thicken and set.
Thick clarified sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it concentrates, helps the mixture set into a spreadable gel.

The step that matters

Stirring during the one-hour boil. Sugar-rich fruit mixtures scorch easily on the bottom of the pan. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly and keeps the marmalade from burning and tasting bitter.

“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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