Name: Quince Wine
Ingredients: 5 ripe quinces; 2.5 pounds loaf sugar

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 Wine

Ingredients

5 ripe quinces
2.5 pounds loaf sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Wipe the quinces clean and remove the cores.
Bruise the quinces as you would apples for cider and press out the juice.
Add 2.5 pounds of loaf sugar to every gallon of juice and stir until dissolved.

Ferment and bottle

Transfer the mixture into a cask and allow it to ferment.
Once fermentation is complete, seal the cask and let it stand until Mardi before bottling.

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.

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 juice and natural aroma that the wine is built on.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness that balances the fruit's acidity.

“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.