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Quince and Apple Preserves
Take equal weights of quinces and sugar, pare, core, leave whole or cut up, as preferred, boil till tender in water enough to cover, carefully take out and put on a platter, add sugar to the water, replace fruit and boil slowly till clear, place in jars and pour syrup over them. To increase the quantity without adding sugar, take half or two-thirds in weight as many fair sweet apples as there are quinces, pare, quarter, and core; after removing quinces, put apples into the syrup, and boil until they begin to look red and clear, and are tender; place quinces and apples in jar in alternate layers, and cover with syrup. For the use of parings and cores, see "Quince Jelly." Apples alone may be preserved in the same way.
A classic equal-weights fruit preserve, with a thrifty second act that stretches one batch of syrup over two fruits. The method is sound; what it leaves out is how long anything takes and what to do with the filled jars.
- The hinge: cook the quinces before the sugar goes inQuinces are stony raw, and sugar firms fruit tissue, so they soften very little once the syrup is sweet. Simmer them in plain water until a skewer slides through easily — roughly 30 to 45 minutes for quarters, longer for whole fruit — and only then dissolve the sugar into the cooking liquid.
- Equal weights means weight, not volumeRoughly 2 lb quinces to 2 lb sugar (about 4 1/2 cups). The recipe does not say whether the fruit is weighed before or after paring; since the parings and cores are saved for jelly, whole-fruit weight is the likelier reading.
- "Boil slowly till clear"Clear means the fruit has turned translucent, and quince often shifts from cream to amber-pink over long slow cooking; expect 30 to 60 minutes of gentle simmering after the sugar goes in. A hard boil risks scorching the syrup before the fruit turns.
- Choosing quincesUse fruit that is fully yellow and fragrant; green quinces are astringent and pale. Peel with a sturdy knife rather than a swivel peeler, and drop the pieces into acidulated water as you go, since cut quince browns quickly.
- Apples for the stretch"Fair sweet apples" most likely means unblemished and not sharply acid. Choose a variety that holds its shape in hot syrup; apples that break down easily will collapse into sauce and defeat the purpose of the layering.
- Pectin and setQuince is very high in pectin, especially in the cores and peel, so the syrup will thicken more than you expect as it cools. If it sets too stiffly, thin it with a little of the reserved cooking water before jarring.
- Filling and keeping the jarsThe original assumes the syrup and a tight cover do the work. Current practice is to fill hot, clean jars to within 1/4 inch of the rim and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes for shelf storage; otherwise refrigerate and eat within a month.
- The paringsThe cross-reference is not decoration. Quince peel and cores carry most of the pectin and perfume, and simmering them for jelly while the preserve cooks gets two products from one fruit.
Quinces were a fixture of nineteenth-century American gardens partly because they are hard, sour and astringent raw and so exist to be cooked, and their pectin made them a mainstay of the preserve shelf before commercial pectin was sold. The recipe's own doneness cue is clarity rather than colour, though quince does redden over long cooking. Stretching the syrup with apples suits the frugal aim of household compilations such as Buckeye Cookery (1877), assembled from Ohio contributors with an eye on cost: sugar was the expensive ingredient, so a batch that yields half again as much preserve for no additional sugar was worth printing. The word quince descends through Middle English and Old French from the Latin cydonium malum, the Cydonian apple, itself from Greek kydonion melon and the place-name Kydonia in Crete.