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Quinces Preserved with Apples
Make the preserves as above and allow one-third weight of sweet apples. When the quince has been cooked tender and removed put the apple in the syrup and simmer till translucent and red, which may take an hour. Place apple and quince in alternate layers in the jars and when the syrup has penetrated the apple it will not be distinguishable from the quince. No more sugar is necessary by the addition of the apples.
This is an extension recipe rather than a standalone one: it assumes you have already started the quince preserve on the preceding page, which follows the standard proportion of roughly equal weights of fruit and sugar cooked in a syrup. The whole point is economy — the apple takes on the colour and flavour of the quince and stretches the batch by a third at no extra cost in sugar.
- The hinge: don't rush the appleThe recipe allows that the simmering may take up to an hour. The apple has to lose enough water and take up enough syrup to turn glassy and pink; pulled early it stays opaque and obviously not quince.
- "One-third weight"Weigh the prepared apple against the prepared quince, not against the sugar. Three pounds of peeled and cored quince takes one pound of peeled and cored apple.
- Choose the right apple"Sweet apples" in this period generally meant low-acid varieties rather than sharp cider or cooking apples. Use a firm modern apple such as Braeburn rather than a McIntosh, which will collapse into sauce in an hour of syrup.
- Where the red comes fromQuince flesh turns from cream to rose during long, slow cooking, which is why the recipe expects colour rather than treating it as a fault. Cooking the peels and cores in the syrup is sometimes said to deepen it, though this recipe does not call for it.
- Why no extra sugar is neededThe syrup made for the quince is sugar-heavy enough to serve both fruits. The apple absorbs sugar from it rather than being cooked with sugar of its own, which is the whole economy of the method.
- Cut the fruit to matchQuince is dense and cooks far more slowly than apple. Cut the apple in thicker wedges than the quince if you want the alternating layers to look uniform once both have shrunk.
- StorageThe recipe simply fills jars, with no processing step, which is not how preserves are put up for the pantry today. Refrigerate the filled jars and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process for shelf storage.
Quince appears here under "The Pear" for good botanical reason: Cydonia oblonga sits beside pear and apple among the pomes, and nineteenth-century fruit books routinely grouped the three together. Hard and astringent, and for most varieties unpleasant raw, quince was valued in the American kitchen for exactly the qualities that make it useless as a dessert fruit: a jelly without any added commercial pectin, and a perfume that survives long cooking. Stretching a quince batch with apple is often said to have been household thrift, since quince trees bore modestly and sugar was the expensive part of any preserve; the trick works because apple is nearly flavourless once it has soaked in quince syrup, a substitution cooks openly admitted to, as this recipe does. The practice faded with the fruit itself: quince all but vanished from American markets after the early twentieth century, for reasons generally traced to disease, changing tastes and the availability of cheap manufactured pectin.