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Canned Quinces
Weigh the fruit after paring, coring, and quartering, allowing six ounces of sugar and nearly a pint of water 60
This entry survives only as a fragment: it gives the syrup proportions and then breaks off mid-sentence (the trailing "60" is a stray page or index number, not part of the instruction). What remains is a ratio, not a procedure.
- No processing directions surviveThe text stops before any statement of how long the jars are boiled, at what temperature, or how they are sealed. Home canning is safe only with a measured processing time in a boiling-water bath sized to the jar and altitude; none of that information is on the page. Use a current tested recipe for canned quinces or quince in syrup.
- What the ratio meansSix ounces of sugar to nearly a pint of water works out to roughly 170 g sugar to 450 ml water, a relatively light syrup by modern standards. The fragment does not say what quantity of fruit these are allowed to; a pound of prepared fruit is the usual unit in books of this kind, but that is an inference. Heavier syrups were generally preferred for long keeping.
- Weigh after trimmingThe instruction to weigh after paring, coring and quartering is the one piece of real technique here. Quince loses a great deal to peel and core, so the syrup would be badly wrong if calculated on whole fruit.
- Quinces are not pearsQuinces and pears -- Older fruit books commonly grouped quince with the pears; both are pome fruits. Raw quince is hard and astringent and is rarely eaten out of hand; it needs long, slow cooking to soften and to turn from cream to pink or amber.
- Cores and pipsQuince cores are fibrous and rich in pectin, and period fruit books record simmering the parings and cores separately for jelly rather than discarding them, which is worth knowing if you are working through a quantity of fruit.
History: Quince was a fixture of the American and British fruit closet long before it became a curiosity. Too hard and too sour to eat out of hand, it was valued for exactly the qualities that made it useless raw: heavy pectin, which sets jelly without additions, and an aroma that survives boiling and perfumes anything cooked with it. Recipes of this period often gave little more than a ratio of sugar and water to the pound of prepared fruit, with the processing directions set out elsewhere in the volume, which may be why a fragment like this one reads as incomplete.