Home › The Principles of Cookery › Quince and Apple Marmalade
Quince and Apple Marmalade
Take a pint of quince juice, prepared as directed in a succeeding recipe (see QUINCE JUICE). Put it into a preserving-pan, with one pound of nicely-flavoured apples, pared, cored, and quartered, and simmer gently until the apples are quite soft. Lift the pan from the fire, and stir in three-quarters of a pound of finely-sifted sugar: when this is dissolved, put the pan again upon the fire, and boil the marmalade quickly for twenty minutes, taking care to stir it well, or it will burn. Turn it while hot into glasses or jars, and cover in the usual way. Store in a cool dry place. Time to boil the apples, one hour.
A two-fruit preserve that relies entirely on the pectin and acid already in the quince juice, so no added pectin or lemon is needed. The measurements translate cleanly once you allow for the imperial pint.
- The pintThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz — about 2 1/2 US cups of quince juice. Using a 16 oz US pint will give a stiffer result, which is not a fault, only a difference.
- Quince juiceThe cross-referenced recipe is not given here, but a preparation of this name would normally mean quinces simmered in water until collapsed and the liquid strained off, as for jelly. Do not peel or core them first: the skins and pips carry most of the pectin. Cloudy juice is fine here, since this is a marmalade rather than a clear jelly.
- Finely-sifted sugarCaster or superfine sugar, sifted to break up lumps so it dissolves off the heat without grinding. Granulated works if you give it a minute longer to dissolve before returning the pan to the fire.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Quince is acidic enough to pick up metal from untinned copper or aluminium. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what sets the preserve.
- The two timingsThe instruction to simmer "until the apples are quite soft" and the closing note of one hour appear to describe the same stage. An hour is generous for cooking apples in quince liquor, and many modern varieties will collapse considerably sooner. Judge by the fruit, not the clock.
- The twenty-minute boilThis is the hinge. Sugar must be fully dissolved before the pan goes back on heat or the marmalade will crystallise, and once boiling it needs near-constant stirring with a flat-ended wooden spatula because the apple pulp catches and scorches quickly. Twenty minutes is a guide: test for set at 220F/105C, or by the wrinkle test on a chilled saucer.
- Covering and keeping"the usual way" in Victorian practice was a waxed paper disc on the hot surface and a tied paper or parchment cover once cold — enough for a cold larder, not for a modern warm kitchen. Refrigerate the filled jars, or process them by a current water-bath method if you want them shelf-stable.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 lb of finished marmalade, enough to fill two or three half-pint jars. It is a spreadable preserve rather than the sliceable quince paste, though it goes well with cheese or cold meat as much as with bread.
Quince was the original marmalade fruit: the word comes through French marmelade from Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, from marmelo, quince. Only later did English usage drift to the citrus preserve, so a Victorian dictionary of cookery still files quince marmalade under its proper heading rather than as a curiosity. The pairing with apple is practical rather than decorative — quinces are hard, scarce and expensive to buy by the pound, while their juice is so rich in pectin and acid that it will set a much larger quantity of blander fruit and lend it the perfume and the deep rose colour that quince develops on long cooking. Recipes of this type appear throughout nineteenth-century English household books at the tail of the fruit season, when quinces from a garden tree ripened alongside the keeping apples and both had to be used before frost.</invoke>