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Quince Pudding
Take six or eight large ripe quinces. Pare, core, and quarter them, and put them into a saucepan, with as much boiling water as will cover them, and let them simmer gently until soft. Press them through a sieve, sweeten the pulp, and flavour with lemon, cinnamon, or ginger. When it is cool, stir into it a pint of thick cream and the well-beaten yolks of three eggs. Line a pie-dish with good puff-paste, pour in the prepared quince, and bake in a moderate oven. Sift white sugar thickly over the pudding before sending it to table. Time to bake, about an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A quince custard tart in all but name. The recipe assumes you know how much sugar a bowl of raw quince pulp needs and how far a puff-paste case can be pushed, so those are the two places to pay attention.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is usually reckoned at around 350F/175C. An hour at that heat is right for a custard this deep, but start checking at 40 minutes: the filling should wobble as a single mass at the centre, not ripple.
- The quinces themselvesRaw quince is stony and will not soften in the time you would give an apple. Expect 30-45 minutes of gentle simmering, longer for underripe fruit, and keep the pan covered so the water does not boil away. Six to eight large quinces will give a generous quantity of sieved pulp -- likely more than a single pie-dish will take, so judge by the dish.
- Sweetening, which is left to youQuince is markedly more acid and astringent than apple. Around 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar per 3 cups of pulp is a fair starting point; taste the warm pulp before the cream and eggs go in, since you cannot correct it afterwards.
- "A pint of thick cream"An imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. "Thick cream" means what is now sold as double or heavy cream, not clotted cream and not anything labelled single or light.
- Cool the pulp firstThe instruction to wait until it is cool is the hinge of the recipe. Stirring beaten yolks into hot fruit purée scrambles them, and the pudding sets grainy rather than smooth.
- The pastry casePuff paste under a wet custard goes soft. Line the dish, chill it well, and blind-bake it for 15 minutes at 400F before filling; the base will hold up far better through the long bake.
- FinishingThe sugar is sifted on after baking, before the pudding goes to table. Do it while the pudding is still warm so it clings, or hold it back until just before serving so it does not dissolve into a syrup.
- Yield and costFive or six portions, baked in a pie-dish; the recipe does not specify its size. The "2s. 6d." is late-Victorian retail pricing and is of historical interest only.
Quinces were a standing feature of English kitchen gardens long before they became a specialist-greengrocer item, and Victorian cookery books treat them as an everyday autumn fruit rather than a curiosity — valued precisely because they cannot be eaten raw and so must be cooked, sweetened and preserved. The high pectin and strong perfume that make quince ideal for marmalade and cheese also make it good in a custard, where the pulp thickens the mixture and the scent survives an hour in the oven. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium aimed at middle-class households running on a cook and a budget, gives this the standard treatment of the period: a costed dish, a stated number of persons, and flavourings offered as alternatives (lemon, cinnamon, or ginger) rather than prescribed. The form — fruit purée enriched with cream and yolks, baked in a pastry case — is the same one behind the older English pumpkin, apple and "codling" puddings, and is generally traced to the medieval and Tudor habit of setting sweetened fruit in a coffin of paste.