Home › The Principles of Cookery › Quince Marmalade, Superior
Quince Marmalade, Superior
Take some ripe quinces, wash them, and put them whole into a preserving-pan, with as much boiling water as will cover them. Let them simmer gently until they are so soft that they can be easily pierced with a pin. Lift them out, peel and core them, put the cores and skins back into the water, and boil until it is considerably reduced, then strain it. Cut the fruit into thin slices. Weigh these with an equal weight of refined sugar. Put them with the sugar into a preserving-pan, pour over them the strained liquor, boil the whole slowly over a gentle fire, and stir with a wooden spoon till it is thick and smooth. In order to ascertain whether or not it is done enough put a little every now and then upon a plate, and when it jellies it is done. Put it, whilst hot, into glasses or jars, and cover in the usual way. Time, five hours or more.
A true fruit-and-sugar preserve that relies on the quince's own pectin, most of which sits in the parts you would normally throw away. The instructions are sound; only the vessels, the sugar weight and the final sealing need translating.
- The hinge: keep the cores and peelQuince is a high-pectin fruit, and the skins, cores and seeds are richer still. Returning them to the cooking water and reducing it hard is what makes this set without added pectin, so do not skip that step or strain it carelessly — press the pulp against the sieve to get everything out.
- Preserving-panAny wide, heavy-bottomed pan of stainless steel or copper, at least twice the depth of the fruit. Width matters more than depth: evaporation is what thickens this, and a tall narrow pot will scorch the bottom before the top reduces.
- Refined sugarOrdinary granulated white sugar. Equal weight to the sliced, peeled, cored fruit — the recipe weighs the slices, so weigh after trimming, not before.
- "Time, five hours or more"This most likely covers the whole operation, including the initial simmer of the whole fruit (roughly an hour, depending on size) and the long reduction of the peel liquor; the final boil with sugar need not take hours on a modern burner.
- Testing the setThe plate test in the original works: a chilled saucer, a teaspoon of marmalade, a minute to cool, then push it with a fingertip and look for a wrinkling skin. A thermometer reading 220F (105C) at sea level tells you the same thing sooner.
- ColourQuince often turns from pale cream to amber and, with long cooking, to deep ruby. Treat the colour as a rough guide only; judge doneness by the plate test.
- StirringA wooden spoon, and constant attention once it thickens. Quince marmalade catches and burns readily in the last ten minutes, and scorched sugar taints the whole batch.
- "Cover in the usual way"In Victorian practice this meant a disc of brandied paper laid on the hot surface and a paper or bladder cover tied over the top. For keeping at room temperature now, use hot sterilised jars with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; the preserve is acidic and heavily sugared, so it is a straightforward canning candidate.
- YieldThe original gives none. Reckon roughly three to four half-pint jars per 2 lb of whole quinces, which loses about a third of its weight to peel and core.
Quince was the original marmalade fruit: the word comes through the French marmelade from Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, itself from marmelo, quince. The shift of "marmalade" to mean a citrus preserve is a later British development, which is why a Victorian dictionary of cookery can still print a quince recipe under the name without qualification. Quinces were common in English gardens and were valued precisely because they are useless raw — hard, astringent and gritty — but transform under long cooking into something fragrant and deeply coloured, and set firmly with no help beyond sugar. The label "superior" presumably distinguishes this version from a plainer method using sliced raw fruit, though the book gives no reason; the extra labour of pre-simmering whole and extracting the peel liquor is what buys the better set.