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Dessert

Peach, Apple, Oe Quince Leathee

A dried fruit strip made from apples or quince, sweetened with sugar and sun-dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach, Apple, Oe Quince Leathee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fruit paste

  1. Peel and cut the fruit into small pieces.

  2. Boil the fruit with minimal water, mashing it fine with a spoon while it cooks.

  3. Add the sugar and boil for another 15 to 20 minutes.

Dry and finish

  1. Spread the mixture thinly on a flat tin or platter to dry.

  2. Dry it outdoors in the sun under netting, bringing it in at night, or use a cool oven with the door open.

  3. Allow several days for drying, then cut into strips, roll in sugar, and either roll up or leave in plain lengths.

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

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

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

Apples
Provides the main fruit body and pectin that lets the paste set into a sliceable sheet.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps preserve it and give the dried strips a firm, chewy texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the fruit with sugar. Sugar added to fruit that is still too wet can slow evaporation and leave the strips sticky. Cooking until the mixture is thick and mashed fine helps it dry evenly into a leathery sheet.

“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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