Quince Jam
Pour boiling water over them and let them remain till the skin rubs off easily. Then peel them and cut off the fair slices. To each pound put twelve ounces sugar, and let them stew together till the syrup is sufficiently thick. Quince preserves may be made by the same recipe as that used for pears.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century preserve: fruit, sugar, and time on the stove. The proportions are sound, but quinces behave differently from the soft fruits most cooks know, and the recipe assumes you already understand that.
- The hinge: cook the fruit before the sugar sets itQuince flesh is stony and stays that way if sugar goes in too early. Stew the slices in a little water until a knife slides through easily, then add the sugar and cook down to setting point. The recipe's "let them stew together" only works if you keep enough liquid in the pan to soften the fruit first.
- The proportionTwelve ounces sugar to a pound of prepared fruit is about 3/4 by weight, less than a modern jam ratio. Quince is very high in pectin and acid, so it sets readily at that level, but the jam will keep less well than a 1:1 preserve and should be refrigerated once opened.
- PeelingThe boiling-water trick works on ripe fruit, but quinces picked hard will not slip their skins. A vegetable peeler is faster and no less faithful. Keep the peels and cores tied in muslin and cook them with the fruit for extra pectin, then lift the bag out before potting.
- "Fair slices"Fair means unblemished. Quinces bruise brown inside and often have gritty stone cells near the core; cut those away. Trimming loss can be substantial -- often a quarter to a third of the whole fruit's weight -- so weigh after trimming, not before.
- ColourLong cooking turns quince from pale cream to amber, rose, or deep red, depending on the variety and the time. Colour is a rough guide to progress rather than a reliable test; judge the set by the syrup sheeting off a spoon, or by a modern thermometer at around 220F.
- YieldTwo pounds of trimmed fruit with its sugar makes roughly four to five half-pint jars. The recipe gives no instruction for potting or sealing; for shelf storage, use current water-bath canning directions.
- The cross-reference"The same recipe as that used for pears" points the reader to a pear recipe elsewhere in the book; check that entry, since the quince instructions here are incomplete without it.
Quinces were a fixture of Southern and Mid-Atlantic kitchen gardens well into the nineteenth century: before commercial pectin was sold, a quince or a bag of its peels was what made other fruits jell. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) is a compilation of contributions from many Virginia housekeepers, which accounts for the telegraphic style here and for the cross-reference to another cook's pear recipe rather than a full set of instructions. The word marmalade itself comes through Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste, and quince preserving is generally traced back through medieval European cookery to much older Mediterranean practice. The fruit fell out of American home use in the twentieth century, though it cannot be eaten raw and demands the long cooking this recipe takes for granted.