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The Quince (HONEY No I Cake or Tart)
QUINCE HONEY No. I (Cake or Tart Filling) This will make filling for layer cake, or, thinned, a delicate syrup for sauces, etc. Grate two large quinces and cook till tender. Add a pound of sugar to a pint of water, cooking till the "soft ball" stage is reached when add the quince and simmer twenty minutes longer, stirring most of the time. For tarts use this with a custard.
QUINCE HONEY No. 2 (Syrup for Pancakes or Puddings) Prepare quinces as above, using two pints of sugar to one pint of water and simmer till the syrup is clear-four or five minutes when add the grated quince and boil six or seven minutes more before removing from the fire.
Two sugar syrups built on grated quince, differing only in the ratio of sugar to water and the length of the boil. The name is descriptive: the finished preserve is amber and thick, and contains no honey.
- Soft ball means 235-240FVersion No. 1 hinges on getting the syrup to the soft-ball stage before the fruit goes in; use a candy thermometer rather than guessing. Adding the quince earlier is likely to give a thinner syrup, since the added fruit moisture has to boil off again.
- Grating raw quinceQuinces are dense and woody, harder than any apple. Peel and core first, then use the coarse side of a box grater or the shredding disc of a food processor; a paring knife alone will fight you. Drop the gratings into acidulated water if you are working slowly, as they brown fast.
- "Cook till tender"Simmer the gratings in just enough water to cover, roughly 10 to 15 minutes, until the shreds are soft. Raw quince is hard and astringent and will stay that way in sugar syrup.
- The measurementsA pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups; a pint of water is 2 cups. In No. 2 the sugar is given by volume rather than weight, so 2 pints means 4 cups, roughly 1¾ lb, against 2 cups of water. The two versions really are the same preserve at different concentrations.
- Pectin and setQuince is among the highest-pectin fruits there is, and both versions will thicken considerably as they cool. Judge the consistency off the heat, not in the pan, or you will overcook No. 1 into something too stiff to spread between cake layers.
- Stirring is not optionalAt soft-ball concentration the syrup scorches easily once the fruit is in. Use a heavy-bottomed pan and keep the heat moderate for the full twenty minutes.
- Yield and keepingTwo large quinces with this quantity of sugar gives roughly 2½ to 3 cups. Neither version is processed for shelf storage, so refrigerate and use within two or three weeks.
- The tart version"Use this with a custard" indicates the honey was paired with a plain egg custard in a tart shell, though the recipe does not say how the two were layered.
"Honey" was a nineteenth-century American name used for certain thick, pale-gold fruit preserves that resembled the real thing in colour and body — apple honey and quince honey both appear in household books of the period, and neither contains a drop of it. Quince earned the name honestly: its high pectin and its perfume give a syrup that sets glossy and clings like honey. The fruit was once a dooryard fixture across the eastern United States, planted as a hedge or corner tree — it existed to be cooked, and it repaid long cooking with colour, since the pale flesh turns pink to deep red as it heats. Its decline in American kitchens through the twentieth century is usually traced to the spread of commercial pectin, which let cooks set jellies from any fruit they liked and removed the quince's chief practical advantage.