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QUINCE MARMALADE (another way) (Take quinces that are quite)
Take quinces that are quite ripe, pare, cut them into quarters, taking out the core, and put them into a stewpan, with spring water enough to cover them. Keep them closely covered, and let them stew gently till they are quite soft and red, then mash and rub them through a hair sieve. Put them in a pan over a gentle fire, with as much clarified sugar as the weight of the quinces. Boil for an hour, stirring all the time, to keep the marmalade from sticking. Put it into pots, and tie down when cold.
A straightforward two-ingredient preserve whose only real difficulty is patience: the colour and the set both come from long, slow cooking rather than anything you add.
- The hinge: cook to red before you add sugarThe first stewing is what turns pale quince flesh deep amber-red, and the brief instruction hides how long it takes: 45 minutes to well over an hour of gentle covered simmering. Sugar added early firms the fruit and holds back the colour, so do not rush this stage.
- "Clarified sugar"In Victorian usage this is loaf sugar dissolved in water and clarified with beaten egg white to remove impurities, then boiled to a syrup. Modern granulated sugar needs none of that; use it straight, weight for weight with the sieved pulp, not with the raw whole quinces.
- Weight for weightEqual weights of pulp and sugar is a standard preserve ratio and is what makes the marmalade keep. Reducing it substantially will give a looser, more perishable product.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, an ordinary piece of kitchen equipment and one with the advantage of not reacting with acid fruit. A food mill or a stainless drum sieve does the same job. Use stainless or enamelled pans throughout — bare iron and aluminium discolour quince.
- Don't discard the paringsQuince cores and skins are extremely rich in pectin. Tie them in muslin and stew them with the fruit, then lift them out before sieving, and the set will be firmer and faster.
- The hour of boilingTreat it as an approximation and go by behaviour: the marmalade is ready when a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a channel that closes slowly, or at about 220F/105C. Because it is thick and prone to catching, stir constantly and expect it to spit.
- Potting and covering"Tie down when cold" means a paper or bladder cover over the cooled surface, which relied on the sugar alone. Fill hot into sterilised jars and seal, or process in a boiling-water bath, if you want reliable long storage.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, 2 lb of prepared quince pulp with an equal weight of sugar makes several half-pint jars, depending on how far it is boiled down. Reduced far enough it stiffens to a sliceable paste, and can be poured into a shallow tray and cut into squares as a cheese.
Quinces were a standard fixture of the English preserving cupboard long before Cassell's, and the word marmalade itself belongs to them before it belonged to oranges: it comes through French from Portuguese marmelada, a solid quince paste, marmelo being the Portuguese for quince. That paste — the counterpart of Spanish membrillo — reached Britain in boxes as a luxury sweetmeat in the sixteenth century, and only later did the name drift across to the citrus preserves that now monopolise it. A book like this one carries several versions of quince marmalade because the fruit was still commonly grown in British gardens and is almost inedible raw: hard, astringent and stony, it exists to be cooked. The colour change the recipe takes for granted, from cream to russet red, is a real chemical effect of prolonged gentle heat on the fruit's tannins and pigments.