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Dried Quinces
Pare and slice the fruit; string and dry or spread to dry as for apples and pears. When needed for use wash and soak them over night, putting on to stew in the last water.
A preserving note rather than a dish, and it assumes you have already read the entries for drying apples and pears. Quinces are harder, drier and more astringent than either, which changes a few things.
- The hinge: soak and stew in the same waterThe overnight soaking water carries back the sugars, acid and aroma pulled out of the fruit during drying. Discarding it and starting fresh gives a flat, woody stew.
- Preparing the fruitRub off the grey fuzz, peel, quarter and cut out the core, which is gritty and full of hard stone cells. A raw quince is dense enough to be dangerous under a knife; halve it flat-side-down and use a heavy blade.
- Slice thicknessEven rings or slices about a quarter-inch thick dry uniformly. Thicker pieces case-harden on the outside and stay damp at the centre, which is where spoilage starts.
- "String and dry"Threading slices on cotton twine and hanging them in a warm, airy, insect-free place is the nineteenth-century method and depends on a dry climate. A dehydrator or an oven at its lowest setting, around 135-145F with the door propped, does the same work in 8-12 hours; the fruit should be leathery and pliable with no bead of moisture when squeezed.
- No sulfur hereCommercially dried fruit was often sulfured to keep it pale. Untreated quince slices go deep tan to brick, which is cosmetic only and, in quince, arguably an improvement.
- StorageCondition the dried slices in a loosely closed jar for a week, shaking daily, and repack if any moisture appears on the glass. Kept dry and dark they hold a year.
- Cooking the soaked fruitQuince does not collapse the way apple does. Expect 40 minutes to an hour of gentle stewing before the pieces turn tender and shift from yellow toward pink or red; sugar is generally added near the end, since it slows softening.
- YieldQuince loses a great deal of weight in drying and peeling. Roughly 5 lb of fresh fruit gives about 1 lb dried, and a cup of dried slices soaked and stewed serves two or three.
Quince (Cydonia oblonga) is one of the oldest cultivated fruits of western Asia and the Mediterranean, and in American and British households it survived into the twentieth century mainly as a preserving fruit rather than an eating one: too hard, sour and astringent raw, but exceptionally high in pectin and aromatic enough to perfume a whole pantry. That chemistry made it the backbone of jellies, marmalades and cheeses, and the same fruit dried well because its dense flesh holds together instead of turning to shreds. The instruction to treat it "as for apples and pears" is typical of period fruit books, which grouped the pome fruits together and expected the reader to work from one master method; before home canning equipment was cheap and common, stringing sliced fruit to dry in an attic or over a stove was an ordinary way a household carried an autumn glut into February. The pink colour that develops during long stewing is generally attributed to tannins in the flesh changing under prolonged heat.