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Quince Honey
Pare half a dozen quinces and drop them into cold water; cover the skins with boiling water and let cook rapidly half an hour, then drain. Grate the quinces, adding the pulp as grated to the quince liquid drained from the skins. When all are grated, measure or weigh the pulp and liquid, and add the weight or measure of the material in sugar; let boil rapidly twenty minutes, then store as jelly. Or boil the quince and water mixture twenty minutes, add the sugar (hot), and cook about five minutes.
A high-pectin preserve that depends almost entirely on the quince skins and cores for its set. The book assumes you know the jelly drill; here is what it leaves out.
- Do not discard the skinsThe half-hour rapid boil of the parings extracts a good deal of pectin. Strain that liquid and keep it: the recipe calls for the grated pulp to be added to it, and it helps the set.
- Acidulate the holding waterPeeled quince browns within minutes, which is presumably why the recipe drops the pared fruit straight into cold water. A tablespoon of lemon juice per quart will keep the pulp paler.
- Grating raw quinceRaw quince is dense and gritty and hard on the knuckles. A box grater works but is slow; the shredding disc of a food processor does six fruit in a minute. Grate directly into the reserved skin liquid so the shreds do not oxidise.
- Measure or weigh, and pick oneEqual sugar by weight and equal sugar by volume are not the same thing here. Weight is the safer reading of the instruction: roughly a pound of sugar to a pound of combined pulp and liquid. Six medium quinces give about 2 to 2 1/2 lb of fruit.
- Judging the twenty minutesTwenty minutes of hard boiling is a guide, not a rule, since the water content of the pulp varies. Cook to 220F on a candy thermometer, or until a spoonful sheets off the edge rather than dripping.
- Hot sugar in the second methodThe alternative version adds sugar already hot so the boil is not knocked back. Warm it in a low oven, around 250F, in a metal pan while the fruit cooks.
- "Store as jelly"For a book of this period that meant hot glasses sealed with melted paraffin. Use half-pint canning jars and a boiling-water bath of 10 minutes instead; paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable. Expect roughly four to five half-pints.
- ServingCoarser than jelly and thicker than a syrup, so it holds its shape on toast and is good spooned over baked apples or a plain rice pudding.
Quince honey is generally said to take its name from its look and behaviour rather than any ingredient: cooked with an equal weight of sugar, the grated fruit turns amber and thick, and spreads much as honey does. Quince (Cydonia oblonga) is too hard and astringent to eat raw but is exceptionally high in pectin, and before commercial pectin was sold in packets it was often among the fruits American cooks turned to when they wanted a dependable set " often adding a few quinces to apple or grape preserves for that reason alone. Recipes of this kind belong to a period when quince trees still stood in ordinary yards and refined sugar had become cheap enough to use pound for pound with fruit; the fruit became less common in home gardens over the twentieth century, and the dish is now unfamiliar while apple butter is not.