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Quinces, Preserved Whole
Pare some ripe quinces, and scoop out the cores without opening the fruit. Put them into boiling water, and let them simmer gently until they are tender without being broken. Drain them, put them aside to cool, and boil the liquor with a pound of sugar for every pound of fruit; pour it over the quinces, and let them remain until the next day. Add to the syrup as much apple jelly as will cover the fruit. Dissolve it with the syrup, and put the quinces into it. Let them boil quickly until they look clear, then put them into glasses. Put a small portion of the liquor upon a plate, and if it will jelly when cold, it is ready for pouring over the fruit; if not, it must be boiled until it will do so. If no apple jelly is at hand, it may be made as follows. Take some fine golden pippins or small crab apples, rub them with a soft cloth, and put them, without paring them, into a preserving-pan, with as much water as will barely cover them. Let them simmer gently until the fruit is quite soft. Strain the juice through a jelly-bag, two or three times if necessary, until it is quite clear, and boil it, with a pound of sugar for every pint of liquor, until it will jelly when a little is put upon a plate; it is then ready for use. If liked, quince-juice may be used instead of apple jelly to cover the fruit. To make this, cut up some small quinces without coring or paring them, and boil them in as much water as will cover them until the liquor is strongly flavoured with them. Strain the juice, and boil it, with a pound of sugar to each pint, until it will jelly. If when the quinces are being boiled in the jelly they seem likely to break, they must be lifted one by one carefully out of the syrup, put into a jar, and the syrup poured over them, then boiled again the next day. Time, two or three days.
A three-day sugar preserve of the old school, built in stages so the fruit stays whole rather than collapsing into paste. Everything turns on gentle heat in the first boiling and a properly tested set at the end.
- The hinge: cook the fruit before the sugar touches itQuinces must be simmered tender in plain water first; sugar added early firms the flesh so that it softens only very slowly, if at all. Keep the water at a bare tremble, not a rolling boil, or the fruit splits and the whole point of "whole" is lost.
- Coring without opening the fruitAn apple corer worked in from the blossom end, or a narrow melon baller, will hollow the core out through a single hole. Ripe quinces are still hard as turnips, so peel with a sturdy vegetable knife rather than a swivel peeler, and drop them straight into acidulated water because the cut flesh browns fast.
- Timing on the first simmerExpect 20 to 45 minutes depending on size and ripeness, not the few minutes an apple would need. Test with a skewer at the thickest point; it should meet slight resistance, since the fruit gets a second cooking in the jelly.
- Sugar proportionsA pound of sugar to a pound of fruit for the syrup, and a pound of sugar to a pint of juice for the jellies. A pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so read it as roughly 450 g sugar to 570 ml juice.
- "Golden pippins" and crab applesGolden pippin is a small tart English dessert apple, now rare in commerce; any hard, sharp, slightly underripe apple works, Bramley and crab apples best of all. They are used unpeeled and uncored because the skin and cores are the richest source of pectin.
- The jelly-bagLet the pulp drip; do not squeeze or press, which pushes fine solids through and clouds the jelly. Straining two or three times, as the recipe says, is the price of a clear result.
- Testing the setThe plate test is still the reliable one, but a thermometer shortens the guesswork: setting point is around 220F (104C) at sea level. Take the pan off the heat while you test, or it will overshoot and go gummy.
- ColourLong, slow cooking is what turns pale quince flesh deep amber to ruby. A preserve still straw-coloured has generally not had long enough in the pan.
- Jars and keeping"Glasses" means small preserving jars. Fill them hot, seal, and treat the result as a high-sugar preserve: sound jars keep in a cool dark cupboard, opened ones in the refrigerator. Yield is not given.
Quince was the standard European preserving fruit long before jam meant strawberries: it is loaded with pectin, keeps for months raw, and is almost inedible until cooked, so nearly every historical treatment of it is a sweet conserve. The word marmalade comes through Portuguese marmelo, quince, and originally meant a stiff quince paste, the ancestor of Spanish membrillo; the "quiddany" of Tudor and Stuart English kitchens is usually understood to have been a clear quince jelly rather than the boxed paste. Preserving the fruit whole, as here, was the showiest version, and the recipe's fallback of apple jelly reflects a practical Victorian point: apples and quinces are close enough in pectin and acid that one will happily set the other, and the two are often paired in nineteenth-century preserve chapters. Cassell's includes it at a moment when quince trees were still common in English gardens, before the fruit slid out of the ordinary shopping basket in the twentieth century.