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Baked or Steamed Quinces
Quinces make an attractive dessert baked or steamed, using the same method as for apples and pears. Grate them for variation.
The instruction leans entirely on the apple and pear directions elsewhere in the book, which is a problem: a raw quince is nothing like a ripe pear. Everything below is about closing that gap.
- The hinge: cook them far longerQuinces are dense, astringent and hard when raw, and they do not soften on the schedule apples do. Baked whole or halved at 350F they want 1 to 1 1/2 hours covered, and steaming halves takes 40 minutes or more. Undercooked quince is gritty and mouth-puckering; there is no way to rush it.
- Sugar and liquid are not optionalWhere a baked apple can go into the dish with a spoonful of sugar and nothing else, quinces need a syrup or at least a generous splash of water in the dish to keep them from drying to leather. Roughly 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water per pound of fruit, poured around the fruit and the dish covered.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven, conventionally taken as about 350F, is what this wants. Hotter than that and the outsides scorch before the centres give.
- Preparing the fruitRub off the grey fuzz, quarter and core; the core is woody and full of hard seeds. Peel or not as you like, but the peel stays tough even when the flesh is tender. A sturdy knife and a steady board matter more here than with any other orchard fruit.
- They will turn pinkLong slow cooking turns quince flesh from pale cream to rose or deep amber. This is expected and is not a sign of spoilage.
- "Grate them for variation"Grate the peeled raw fruit on a coarse grater, then steam or bake the shreds with sugar and a little water. Grated quince cooks in 20 to 25 minutes and collapses into a fragrant compote, which is the quickest route to edible quince in this entry.
- YieldFigure one medium quince per person as a dessert, or about 1 1/2 lb of fruit to give four servings of the grated version.
Quinces were a standard fixture of American and British kitchen gardens well into the early twentieth century, valued less as fresh fruit than as a source of pectin and perfume: a single quince dropped into an apple pie or a jelly kettle scented the whole batch. That utility may well be why a fruit almost nobody eats raw earned its own entries in books like this one, and the brevity of the instruction here suggests, though one can only guess, a household that already knew the fruit. The name descends through Old French cooin from Latin cotoneum, generally traced back to the Greek for the apple of Kydonia in Crete. Its decline in home cooking is often attributed to commercial pectin and cheap jam; on that account, once cooks no longer needed the quince tree, the long cooking it demands stopped being worth anyone's afternoon.