Home › The Pear › Quince Cider
Quince Cider
Make as for Apple Cider.
QUINCE JELLY No. I When quince preserves are made the parings and cores may be used for jelly, covering them with cold water and cooking slowly three hours or longer. Strain through a jelly bag over night; boil and skim juice in the morning for fifteen minutes then strain again, measuring and placing in clean cooking vessel with three-fourths its weight of heated sugar. Cook twenty minutes or till it jells. Vary the flavouring used with quince as with apple.
QUINCE JELLY No. 2 Quince jelly may be made with the whole fruit, when the juice is strained allowing the usual proportion of a pound of sugar to a pint of juice. Lemon may be used with this as variety.
QUINCE JELLY No. 3 Use equal quantity of quinces and Maiden's Blush apples, adding sugar in proportion of three-fourths pound of sugar to a pint of juice.
QUINCE MARMALADE Nos. I and 2 Slice unpeeled quinces, barely covering with water, and cooking till tender. Press through sieve and replace on stove, allowing one pound and a quarter to each pound of quince pulp. Cook slowly and carefully, stirring frequently, till stiff. Pieplant may be cooked with this marmalade for a pleasant tart tone.
QUINCE MARMALADE No. 3 Apple and Quince Use equal parts of Maiden's Blush apple and quince, proceeding as above, allowing but one pound of sugar to each pound of pulp.
A cluster of quince preserves from the pear chapter, written for cooks who assumed you knew what a jelly bag was and when to stop boiling. The sugar ratios are sound; the omissions are in the sealing and the doneness test.
- The hinge: know when it jellsNone of these give a reliable end point beyond "till it jells." Cook to 220F at sea level (8F above the boiling point of water where you are), or use the cold-plate test: a spoonful on a chilled saucer should wrinkle when pushed after a minute in the freezer. Quince is so rich in pectin that overcooking gives a rubbery, dark set rather than a soft one.
- Parings and cores are the pointJelly No. 1 is a thrift recipe, and it works because quince pectin concentrates in the skin, core and seeds. Three hours of slow simmering is not excessive here — it is what extracts the pectin. Keep the water at a bare shiver, not a boil, or the juice clouds.
- Do not squeeze the bagStraining overnight through a jelly bag means letting it drip untouched. Pressing or wringing forces pulp through and produces cloudy jelly, which is the one failure this recipe cannot recover from.
- Pieplant is rhubarbUse the stalks only, trimmed of all leaf. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not eaten. A cup or so of chopped stalk per few pounds of quince is enough for the tart note intended.
- Maiden's BlushAn American heirloom apple, tart and early-ripening, still grown by orchard specialists but not in supermarkets. Substitute any firm, sharp, high-pectin cooking apple — Gravenstein, Bramley or Granny Smith all serve.
- Ambiguous sugar in Jelly No. 1"Three-fourths its weight of heated sugar" follows only the word "measuring," which does not say whether the juice is measured by weight or by volume. The reading that matches No. 3 is 12 oz sugar to each pint of juice. "Heated sugar" means sugar warmed before it goes in, so it dissolves without dropping the boil.
- Missing word in Marmalade No. 1"Allowing one pound and a quarter to each pound of quince pulp" means one and a quarter pounds of sugar. At that ratio the paste sets very stiff — stiff enough to slice, in the old Portuguese manner — so stir constantly at the end and expect it to spit.
- SealingThe book says nothing about processing. Paraffin sealing, common in household books of this period, is no longer recommended; follow current water-bath canning guidance for jams and jellies, or refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Quince (Cydonia oblonga) is generally too hard, astringent, and gritty to be eaten raw, though some cultivars are, and it survived in kitchens largely because it is one of the most pectin-rich fruits available, and because long cooking turns its pale flesh a deep rose. That colour change, often attributed to the effect of prolonged heat on the fruit's tannins, accompanies the long cooking times of old jelly recipes, which tell you to cook "three hours or longer" without apology. The word marmalade itself comes from marmelo, Portuguese for quince, and originally meant the solid quince paste still sold as marmelada in Portugal and membrillo in Spain; only later did English usage transfer it to citrus. The instruction to make jelly from parings and cores is characteristic of household books of the period, where a fruit was expected to be used twice — once as preserves, once as jelly — before anything reached the pig.