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Quince Marmalade
Pare, quarter and core quinces, cut in little squares, measure and allow an equal amount of sugar; place the fruit in a porcelain kettle with just water enough to cover, boil till tender, and skim out carefully; make a syrup of the sugar and the water in which the quinces were boiled, let come to boiling point, skim well, and drop the quinces gently in; boil fifteen minutes and dip out carefully into jelly-bowls or molds. The syrup forms a jelly around the fruit so that it can be turned out on a dish, and is very palatable as well as ornamental. In this way quinces too defective for preserves may be used. -Mrs. Mary A. Cooper.
A quince preserve that sets itself: the pectin from the fruit thickens the cooking liquid into a jelly, so the whole thing turns out of a mold. The hinge is not to cook the quince to mush in the first boiling, since it has to hold its cubes through a second fifteen minutes in syrup.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enameled or enamel-lined iron pot, not a ceramic casserole. Any nonreactive pan works; avoid bare aluminum or unlined copper, which discolor acidic fruit and can pick up a metallic taste.
- Measuring the sugarThe sugar is matched to the fruit by volume, not weight — cut the quince cubes, measure them in a cup, and use an equal volume of granulated sugar.
- Don't discard the peels and coresThey hold most of the pectin. Tie them in cheesecloth and simmer them with the fruit, then lift the bag out before making the syrup. Without them the syrup may not set firmly enough to unmold.
- "Boil till tender"Raw quince is hard as a turnip; expect 20 to 35 minutes of gentle simmering for half-inch cubes. Test with a skewer and pull the fruit while it still has bite — it cooks another quarter hour in the syrup.
- The colorQuince turns from pale cream to amber, rose, or deep red as it cooks, from the slow reaction of its tannins. A longer, lazier simmer gives more color; rushing it at a hard boil gives a paler, cloudier result and breaks the cubes.
- Skimming the syrupThe scum is protein and dissolved solids, and leaving it in makes the jelly cloudy rather than clear. Skim before the fruit goes in, when it is easy to reach.
- Molds and unmoldingRinse the bowls with cold water and fill them hot; the jelly needs several hours in the refrigerator to set enough to turn out. Small ramekins or teacups unmold far more reliably than one large bowl.
- KeepingThis is a fresh preserve, not a sealed one — nothing here is processed in a water bath. Refrigerate and eat within two or three weeks.
Quince was a fixture of American preserving well into the twentieth century, and "marmalade" was still sometimes used in its older sense — any fruit boiled thick with sugar, from the Portuguese marmelo, quince — though by the 1870s the association with oranges was already well advanced in English usage. The fruit's virtue in a nineteenth-century kitchen was that it is loaded with pectin and acid and sets without help, which is why it appears again and again in books written before commercial pectin was on the shelf. Mrs. Cooper's note that "quinces too defective for preserves may be used" is the real point of the recipe — this cut-up version salvages the bruised and wormy fruit that would not look well in a jar. Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, is full of that kind of economy, and quince trees were common enough in Midwestern dooryards that a household might face a bushel of imperfect fruit each autumn.