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Dessert

Quince Marmalade

A preserve made from ripe quinces, water, and sugar.

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. Gather fully ripe quinces, pare, quarter, and core them.

  2. Boil the skins with an equal number of teacupfuls of water as pounds of quinces until soft.

  3. Mash the skins and strain the water, then add it to the quinces.

  4. Boil the quinces until soft enough to mash fine.

  5. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add an equal weight of sugar to the pulp and stir together.

  2. Cook over gentle heat until it falls from a spoon like jelly; test in a saucer to check if it jellies when cold.

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
Their natural pectin and acid let the pulp set into a jelly-like marmalade.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, in quantity, helps the mixture thicken and keep its set.

The step that matters

Cooking until it sets. Cooking drives off water and concentrates pectin and sugar; undercooking leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull. A cold saucer test shows whether it will jell.

“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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