Home › The Pear › Quince Cordial
Quince Cordial
To secure the juice from the quinces slice and chop in a vegetable cutter or grate. Allow a pound of sugar for each quart of juice, a handful of bruised plum or peach pits, two or three cloves, grated peel of half a lemon, and` one-half pint of brandy. Let stand in a jug loosely stopped for nearly three weeks when filter, bottle, and seal.
This is a steeped, unheated cordial rather than a cooked syrup, and its flavouring agent is the problem: a handful of bruised stone-fruit kernels left in a sweetened, brandied liquid for three weeks.
- The pits are the hazardPlum and peach kernels contain amygdalin, which breaks down into hydrogen cyanide when the kernel tissue is crushed and left wet. Bruising the pits is precisely the step that starts that reaction, and three weeks of contact with a sugar-and-brandy liquid gives it ample time.
- No quantity is measurable"A handful of bruised pits" gives no way to know how much amygdalin is entering the jug, and the kernel content varies by fruit variety and ripeness. There is no way to make this recipe reproducible or to bound the dose, which is why it should not be attempted.
- Cooking does not fix it hereNothing in the method applies heat, and the cordial is filtered and bottled cold. Even where heat is used, it drives off some but not all of the hydrogen cyanide; the safe course with bruised stone-fruit kernels is not to steep them at all.
- Why the pits are thereThe kernels supplied benzaldehyde, the almond note found in bitter almonds, ratafias and noyau liqueurs. That flavour is why cracked stones and kernels turn up in a good many nineteenth-century cordial recipes, and it is also what carries the toxin.
- If you want a quince cordialUse a current recipe from a modern preserving source. Quince juice, sugar and brandy are sound on their own; it is the kernel infusion that puts this version out of reach.
- On the juice, for referenceQuinces are hard and dense, which is presumably why the original offers a vegetable cutter as well as a grater. They are also high in pectin, so raw pressed juice tends to be cloudy and to throw a sediment; the recipe's final filtering would deal with that, though the three-week stand is the infusion period.
- UnitsA pound of sugar is roughly 450 g. If the measures are US, a quart of juice is about 950 ml and half a pint of brandy about 240 ml (a cup); if imperial, nearer 1,140 ml and 285 ml. 'Loosely stopped' means covered against dust but vented, since a sugary fruit juice will ferment.
Quince was a preserving fruit before it was an eating fruit: too hard and astringent raw, but rich in pectin and aromatic when cooked or steeped, which made it a staple of jellies, marmalades and cordials from the medieval period onward. Cordials of this kind sit between a medicine and a drink, and the vocabulary of the older books keeps that ambiguity alive; a cordial was something taken in small glasses, nominally for the stomach or the heart. The handful of bruised plum or peach pits belongs to the same family as noyau and ratafia, liqueurs built on the almond flavour of stone-fruit kernels, which were widely used in domestic recipes well into the twentieth century.