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QUINCES, PRESERVED (another way)
Soak the quinces before they are quite ripe in salt and water for twenty-four hours. Then take them out, dip them in a hot pickle of white wine vinegar, salt, mace, cloves, and bay-leaves boiled together, and preserve them in a stone jar, covered with vinegar.
This is a room-temperature vinegar preserve with no weights, no measures and no heat processing, which puts it outside what can be recommended today. The notes below explain what the instructions do and do not accomplish.
- No measured acidityThe pickle is described only as "white wine vinegar, salt, mace, cloves, and bay-leaves boiled together" with no proportions. Safe vinegar preserving depends on the finished liquid holding at or below pH 4.6, and there is no way to know from this text whether it does. Historic vinegars also varied widely in strength, unlike the standardised 5 per cent product sold now.
- Dilution by the fruitQuinces are dense and watery, and a raw fruit dipped rather than simmered releases its juice into the covering vinegar over the following weeks. A jar that starts acidic enough can drift out of range as it sits, and nothing in the method accounts for that.
- A dip is not a cureThe fruit is only passed through hot pickle, never cooked through and never held at temperature. The interior of each quince stays raw and at ambient temperature for the whole storage period.
- Sealed jar, low oxygenLow oxygen under the liquid — the recipe says only a covered stone jar, but fruit held submerged under liquid is the sort of low-oxygen environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow if the acidity is insufficient. Soil-grown fruit is a plausible source of the spores, and a 24-hour brine soak would not be expected to remove them.
- The salt soak is for textureThe salt soak — twenty-four hours in salt and water draws out water and firms the flesh before pickling, which reads as a texture step rather than a preservative one. The concentration is unspecified, so its strength cannot be judged from the text.
- Underripe fruit"Before they are quite ripe" is deliberate — hard, high-pectin quinces hold their shape in vinegar where ripe ones collapse. That part of the reasoning is sound and survives in modern pickled-quince recipes, which cook the fruit in a measured syrup or brine and process the jars.
- Blade maceMace here is the dried aril of the nutmeg, sold in blades rather than ground. It is milder and more floral than nutmeg and was a standard pickling spice throughout the nineteenth century.
- If you want pickled quincesUse a current tested recipe with stated vinegar strength, quantities and a processing time. Do not adapt this one.
Quinces were a preserving fruit before they were an eating fruit: too hard and astringent raw, very high in pectin, and long-keeping in a cool store, which made them a staple of the English still-room from the medieval period onward. The word marmalade comes through Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo, quince, and originally meant a stiff quince paste rather than anything made with oranges. The heading 'another way' shows that Cassell's carries more than one quince preserve, a fruit that arrived in a short autumn glut and had to be dealt with all at once. The spiced-vinegar treatment belongs to the older tradition of sweet-sour fruit pickles served alongside cold meat and game, a category that also took walnuts, damsons and red cabbage.