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Quince Cakes
Wash the quinces without peeling, boil them in just enough water to barely cover them till they are quite soft, and then rub them through a coarse sieve. Mix a pound and a half of pounded sugar with each quart of juice, and make it as hot as possible without boiling it. Spread it out upon shallow dishes, and dry in a cool oven or before the fire. Cut the fruit into small shapes.
This is a quince paste — the same family as Spanish membrillo and French cotignac — dried into sheets and cut into sweets rather than boiled to a firm block in a mould. The instruction that matters is the one about heat: the sweetened pulp must never boil, or you get quince cheese with a cooked, caramel edge instead of the clear, floral paste intended here.
- "Juice" means pulpWhat comes through the sieve is thick purée, not liquid. Measure it in a jug as you would juice: a quart is 4 cups, and 1½ lb of sugar to that quart works out to roughly 3⅓ cups of granulated sugar.
- Pounded sugarCaster or ordinary granulated sugar. "Pounded" simply meant loaf sugar broken down in a mortar, sugar being commonly sold in solid loaves.
- As hot as possible without boilingHold the mixture below a boil, around 180-190F, stirring until the sugar has entirely dissolved and the paste is glossy. Boiling darkens the mixture and can turn the pale rose colour that quince develops on cooking to a muddy brown.
- Cool oven200-225F with the door propped slightly, or a dehydrator at 135-140F. Spread the paste no more than ¼ to ⅜ inch deep on parchment-lined trays. Before the fire means overnight in gentle radiant heat, which an oven does more reliably.
- Drying timeExpect 8 to 24 hours depending on depth and humidity. The sheet is ready when it is firm and only faintly tacky, and peels away from the paper cleanly in one piece.
- Choosing and boiling the fruitQuinces are rock-hard raw and want 30-45 minutes at a simmer, cut into quarters if large. Cores and skins carry most of the pectin, which is why the recipe leaves them in and sieves afterwards.
- SievingA coarse sieve and a stiff spoon or a food mill work; a fine sieve clogs on the gritty cells near the core. A food processor is no substitute, as it shreds skin and pip fragments into the paste.
- Yield and finishingA quart of pulp gives roughly 2 lb of finished paste. Cut into diamonds or squares, roll in caster sugar to stop them sticking, and keep between layers of parchment in a tin. They will hold for months and stiffen slowly as they age.
Quinces were once a standard fixture of the English kitchen garden precisely because they keep badly raw and superbly preserved: too astringent and woody to eat out of hand, but so high in pectin that they set into paste with nothing but sugar and time. Sweetmeats of this kind run back at least to the medieval chardequince and the Tudor and Stuart quince marmalades the word marmalade itself comes from the Portuguese marmelo, quince, and only later attached itself to oranges. It was a homely business rather than a confectioner's showpiece: a tree in the garden produced more fruit than anyone could stew, and drying the sweetened pulp before the kitchen fire turned a glut into something that would sit in a tin until Christmas.