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Quince and Sweet Apple Preserves
Pare the quinces, cut in quarters, and remove the cores and woody portion beneath. Cook the skins with water to cover until soft, then strain off this water, and in it cook the quinces and half as many sweet apples, also pared and cored, until each is tender and can be pierced with a straw. Let the fruit stand in cold water after preparation until time of cooking. Cook only as much fruit at a time as can be covered by the liquid. Remove with a skimmer when tender. When all the fruit has been cooked, add to the liquid a pound of sugar for each pound of quince and half a pound of sugar for each pound of apple; boil five minutes, skim, add the fruit, and let cook slowly until of the desired color; long cooking gives a dark-tinted preserve.
Drain on a platter, and when all are cooked and drained, store in jars; let the syrup cook till thick, then strain the hot syrup over the fruit. Use only the liquid from the skins that drains through the cloth. It is best to discard the cores, as they contain gummy properties detrimental to the jelly. The sweet apples may be omitted.
A straightforward two-fruit preserve that leans on the quince's own pectin and tannin. The instructions are complete but assume a cook who already knows how preserving jars are filled and kept.
- The hinge: cook the fruit in the skin liquid, not waterQuince parings carry pectin and much of the perfume, so the strained skin water is the point of the first step. Simmer the parings in just enough water to cover, strain through cloth, and use only what drains through freely rather than pressing the pulp.
- Preventing browningCut quince oxidises to rust brown within minutes. The direction to hold the prepared fruit in cold water is not optional; a squeeze of lemon in the holding water helps further.
- "Pierced with a straw"A broom straw was the standard doneness test. A thin skewer or cake tester does the same job: it should meet slight resistance, not slide through, since the fruit cooks again in the syrup.
- Sweet applesThis means a low-acid dessert apple such as Golden Delicious, Gala or Fuji rather than a tart cooking apple, which is presumably why they are given half the sugar. A very acid, quick-breaking apple such as Bramley would shift the balance.
- Sugar by weight, not volumeA pound of sugar per pound of quince and half a pound per pound of apple works out to roughly 2 1/4 cups and 1 1/8 cups respectively. Weigh the pared, cored fruit before it goes into the holding water.
- Colour and cooking timeQuince turns from pale to amber to deep ruby as it cooks, which is what the note about long cooking means: the longer the slow simmer, the darker the preserve. Stop when the shade suits you.
- Cook in batchesThe instruction to cook only as much fruit as the liquid covers matters for even texture: fruit not under the liquid will not cook at the same rate as the rest.
- Filling and keepingThe book stops at pouring hot syrup over the fruit in jars. Current practice is to fill hot, clean jars to a 1/4-inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath, or simply to treat these as refrigerator preserves and eat them within a few weeks. Sugar at this level discourages spoilage but does not prevent surface mould in an unsealed jar.
Quince was a preserving fruit before it was anything else: hard, astringent and barely edible raw, but so rich in pectin that it gave its name to marmalade, from the Portuguese marmelo, quince. American household books of the early twentieth century still treated it as a standard autumn crop, and this recipe belongs to that moment, when quince trees were common in dooryards and orchards. Pairing it with sweet apples stretched an expensive, slow-ripening fruit while softening its sharpness, and the parings are boiled rather than thrown out for the pectin and flavour they carry. The warning about the cores reflects the same practical eye: quince seeds are heavily mucilaginous, and the gum they release will cloud a syrup that a preserver wanted clear and jewel-coloured.