Baked Quinces
Wash and core ripe quinces, fill with sugar, and bake in bakingdish with a little water.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know quinces. The fruit is hard, astringent and inedible raw, so the whole job is long, slow, moist heat until it softens and turns pink.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 325-350F, and 1 to 2 hours depending on size and ripeness, will do the job; covering the dish helps. Quinces are done when a skewer slides in without resistance; undercooked quince is chalky and mouth-puckering.
- Water in the dish"A little water" need be no more than enough to keep the dish from scorching and to generate steam; half a cup for four to six fruit is a reasonable reading. Covering with a lid or foil for most of the bake, then uncovering at the end to reduce the syrup, is a modern refinement the recipe does not mention.
- SugarCount on 1 to 2 tablespoons per fruit packed into the cored cavity. Quince has far more acid and tannin than apple and takes sugar heavily; taste and add more to the syrup if it is sharp.
- CoringThe core is woody and the skin fuzzy. Rub off the down with a cloth, halve or core with a sturdy apple corer or a paring knife, and expect to use real force. Leave the peel on if you like; it carries much of the pectin and aroma.
- The colour changeLong cooking turns the pale flesh amber to rose, a change driven by the fruit's tannins under prolonged heat. If the fruit is still ivory, it needs more time, not more heat.
- Ripeness"Ripe" here means fully yellow and fragrant, not soft. A green-tinged quince will be slow to bake tender and poor when it does; let it sit at room temperature for a week or two first.
- Yield and servingOne quince per person is generous. Serve warm with cream, or cold with the syrup spooned over.
Quinces were a fixture of American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century in a way they no longer are, valued less for eating out of hand than for their pectin and perfume, which is why so many old books route them into jelly, marmalade and preserves. The word marmalade does derive from marmelo, Portuguese for quince, and the earliest marmalades were quince pastes rather than orange conserves. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in 1877 and reissued in revised editions through the early 1880s, treats the fruit as an ordinary household item and gives it a single unfussy line. The fruit fell out of general use in the twentieth century, commercial pectin and cheap citrus having largely taken over the two jobs it did best.