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Quince Pie
Line the edges of a pie-dish with a short paste. Fill the dish with quinces, pared, cored, and quartered, sprinkle a little sugar on the top, and add a pinch of grated lemonpeel. Moisten the edges, cover the dish with pastry, and bake in a moderate oven. Sift a little powdered sugar over the pie before sending it to table. Time to bake, according to size.
A plain English deep-dish fruit pie of the type Cassell's assumed every cook could assemble from a one-line sketch. The one thing it does not tell you is the thing that decides whether the pie works.
- Quinces will not cook through rawUnlike apples, raw quince stays hard and astringent even after a long spell under a crust. Poach the quartered fruit in sugar syrup until a knife slides in easily (with long slow cooking the flesh will also turn from cream towards pink), then let it cool before filling the dish.
- A moderate ovenUsually reckoned at somewhere around 350F/175C, though the Victorian term covered a range. If the fruit is already cooked, the bake is only about the pastry: roughly 35-45 minutes until the crust is set and golden.
- Short pastePlain shortcrust, roughly half fat to flour, not the sweetened pate sucree used for tarts. Butter, lard, or a mixture of the two were all in use for Victorian short paste.
- Lining the edges onlyAn English deep pie has no bottom crust. A strip of pastry is pressed onto the rim of the dish, moistened, and the lid laid over it so the two seal. Use a dish with a broad flat rim and a pie funnel or inverted eggcup to hold the lid up.
- Sugar is unmeasuredQuince is very tart and needs more than the "little sugar" implies. Around 6-8 oz sugar to 2 lb prepared fruit is usual, most of it going into the poaching syrup rather than sprinkled on top.
- CoringQuince cores are woody and the peel is tough; both are worth keeping. Simmer them in the poaching liquid tied in muslin, since they are rich in pectin and will thicken the juices.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of quinces fills a standard 1.5-quart pie dish and serves six.
The quince was a far more common English fruit in the nineteenth century than it is now, valued precisely because it keeps hard well into winter and because its high pectin content made it the basis of marmalade in the older sense of the word, a stiff paste of quince rather than the citrus preserve the term came to mean. Cassell's treats it here as an ordinary pie fruit alongside apple and rhubarb, with the grated lemon peel doing the same brightening job it does in an apple pie. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book: the deep-dish covered fruit pie, with its pastry rim, sealed lid and dusting of sifted sugar at the table, was so standard in a Victorian kitchen that only the filling needed describing.