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Quince Jelly
Choose quinces that are ripe and yellow, but quite sound. Wash, but do not peel them, cut them into slices, and put them into a preserving-pan. Shake them well down, barely cover them with water, and let them boil gently until they are soft, but they must not be allowed to remain so long as to deepen their colour. Turn them into a jelly-bag, and let the juice drain from them without pressure: filter it two or three times, if necessary, till it is clear and bright. Measure the juice, and boil it quickly for twenty minutes. Take it from the fire, and stir into it, until dissolved, twelve ounces of powdered lump sugar for each pint of juice. Boil it again, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. Let it boil until it will jelly when a little is put upon a plate. Pour it at once into glasses or small moulds. The jelly ought to boil quickly, or the colour will not be good. The pulp left in the jelly-bag may be boiled with moist sugar for common use; half a pound of sugar will be sufficient for each pound of pulp. Time, twenty minutes to boil the juice by itself; a few minutes to boil it with the sugar, or till it jellies.
A straightforward high-pectin jelly that needs no commercial setting agent, only attention to colour and to the set point. Two details in the original do most of the work: never squeeze the bag, and keep the boil fast.
- Lump sugar"Powdered lump sugar" is loaf sugar crushed fine — ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct equivalent. "Moist sugar" for the leftover pulp is unrefined light brown sugar.
- The sugar ratioTwelve ounces per pint means an Imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so roughly 340 g sugar to 570 ml juice. In American measures that is about 1 times cups sugar to 2 times cups juice — a lean ratio by modern jam standards, which works because quince is rich in pectin and acid.
- Do not press the bagThis is the hinge. Any pressure on the pulp forces cloudy sediment through, and refiltering may not fully clear it. Let it drip unattended, ideally several hours or overnight.
- Colour and the fast boilQuince juice darkens with prolonged heating, from pale gold towards amber and rose. The instruction to boil quickly, and to stop cooking the fruit as soon as it is soft, is largely about controlling that shift; a slow simmer with the sugar in tends to give a duller, browner jelly.
- Testing the setThe plate test is sound, but a thermometer is faster: setting point is 220F / 105C at sea level. Expect only a few minutes of boiling after the sugar dissolves — quince sets abruptly and overcooked quince jelly turns tough and gummy.
- Jars, not moulds"Glasses" were small tumblers, typically sealed with waxed paper. For keeping, use hot sterilised jars with two-piece lids, filled to within ¼ inch of the rim; jelly turned out of the small moulds is best eaten soon.
- Don't peel or coreThe skin, core and pips carry most of the pectin, which is why the recipe insists on unpeeled slices. Cut out only bruised or rotten parts; quinces are hard, so a heavy knife helps.
- The second boilingThe pulp cooked with half its weight in sugar gives the plainer preserve the recipe intends for "common use"; cooked down further, or with more sugar, it moves towards the stiff quince cheese or paste eaten with hard cheese. Sieve out the pips and skin first.
- YieldYields vary with the fruit and the boil: 3 lb of quinces might give something in the region of a pint and a half of juice, enough for a few small jars of jelly, plus pulp for a dish of the plainer preserve.
Quince was one of the mainstay English preserving fruits before imported citrus and cheap cane sugar became commonplace; the word marmalade comes, by way of Portuguese marmelo, quince, and originally meant a stiff quince paste rather than anything made with oranges. Hard, astringent and gritty raw, the fruit repays cooking with a distinctive perfume and with enough natural pectin to set on sugar alone. The care taken here over clarity and colour reflects a period in which clear jellies were prized for their appearance as much as their flavour.