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Quince Marmalade
Select ripe yellow quinces, wash clean, pare and core them and cut them into small pieces. To each pound of quinces allow half a pound of white sugar; put the parings and cores into a kettle, with enough water to cover them, and boil slowly until quite soft. Then, having put the quinces with the sugar in a porcelain kettle, strain over them, through a cloth, the liquid from the parings, and cover; boil the whole over a clear fire until it becomes quite smooth and thick, keeping it covered, except when you are skimming it, and watching and stirring closely, to prevent sticking at the bottom. When cold, put in glass jars.
A straightforward two-stage preserve: the peels and cores give up pectin to make the syrup, and the fruit is then cooked down in it. The proportions are workable as written, but the storage instruction is not.
- The hinge: use the paringsQuince cores and skins hold most of the fruit's pectin. Simmering them separately and straining the liquid over the fruit is what makes this set without added pectin, so do not skip or shortcut it.
- Sugar ratioHalf a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is low by modern preserving standards, where equal weights are usual. It gives a fresher, less candied result but a shorter keeping life; the set may be softer than a full-sugar preserve, though quince's high pectin can still carry it.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-lined pot. Quince is acidic enough to react with bare copper, aluminium or unlined iron and pick up a metallic taste. A heavy stainless or enamelled pan is the modern equivalent.
- Covered boilingThe instruction to keep it covered runs against normal jam practice, which relies on evaporation to thicken. Quince cooks a long time and the lid slows the reduction; leaving it uncovered for the final stage is faster and does no harm.
- Time and donenessExpect 45 minutes to over an hour of active cooking. Quince turns from pale yellow to deep pink or amber as it cooks, and that colour change is a useful visual cue. Test on a chilled saucer rather than by the clock; the mixture should mound and pull away from the pan bottom.
- StickingThe sugar-to-fruit ratio and long cook make scorching the main risk. Use the heaviest pan you own, stir to the bottom corners, and drop the heat once the mixture thickens.
- StorageFilling cold jars with cold marmalade, as written, gives no seal and invites surface mould. Either refrigerate and eat within a few weeks, or fill hot sterilised jars and water-bath process them following current guidance for fruit preserves.
- YieldNot stated. As a rough guide, three pounds of prepared quince with a pound and a half of sugar would give somewhere around four to six half-pint jars, depending on how far it is cooked down.
Quince was for centuries the preserving fruit above all others in Europe, and the word marmalade comes to English from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, from marmelo, quince — the orange sense of the word is later. Raw quince is hard, astringent and barely edible, so nearly every historical use involves long cooking with sugar, which softens the flesh, turns it pink and brings out a perfume closer to pear and rose than apple. It belongs to a time when a household's winter sweets came largely from what had been put up in autumn. The trick of boiling the peels and cores for their pectin, used here without the word pectin ever appearing, was ordinary practical knowledge decades before the chemistry was commercially bottled.