Home › Pudding Recipes › Baked Quinces
Baked Quinces
1 oz. (1 heaping tablespoonful) butter I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter 6 quinces 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) sugar 1¼ cupfuls water Pare and core the quinces, place them in a deep buttered earthenware dish, and pour over them one Pour into a buttered fireproof dish and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.
Serve with hot milk.
The text as printed has been damaged in transmission: the sentence about pouring liquid over the fruit breaks off mid-clause, and a second set of instructions ("Pour into a buttered fireproof dish") appears to have drifted in from a neighbouring recipe. Treat it as a sketch rather than a set of directions.
- The hinge: quinces are not applesRaw quince is hard, dry and astringent, and half an hour will not touch it. Baked whole or halved with a little liquid and covered, they need roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours before the flesh turns tender and the colour shifts from cream to rose. The half hour in the original is the one number here that modern practice flatly overturns.
- "A moderate oven"350F / 175C. For quince, a lower and longer bake at 300-325F is closer to what actually produces the amber-pink colour, which comes from slow heating rather than browning.
- On the waterThe printed page gives 1¼ cupfuls of water for six quinces, which is what our text now reads. Quinces baking under cover want enough liquid to sit a finger's depth in the dish and not dry out, so top up if the dish is wide.
- Ounces to volumeThe sugar gloss is about right (4 oz granulated sugar is roughly 1/2 cup); the butter gloss is generous, since 1 oz of butter is nearer two level tablespoons than one heaping one. Six quinces will take considerably more sugar than 4 oz if you want them sweet rather than merely tempered, as quince is high in acid.
- Paring and coringQuince flesh is dense enough to be genuinely hard on a knife and it browns quickly once cut. Work with a heavy peeler and a sturdy blade, and drop the pared fruit into acidulated water. The cores and peel are worth simmering separately for their pectin.
- The vessel"Deep earthenware dish" and "fireproof dish" both point to an ovenproof baking dish. Cover it, with a lid or foil, or the exposed fruit dries to leather over a long bake.
- Yield and servingSix quinces serve six as a plain pudding. The hot milk finish is plain and old-fashioned; cream, custard or the syrup from the dish suits most tables better.
Quince (Cydonia oblonga) is one of the old orchard fruits that held its place in cookery partly because it is generally too hard and astringent to eat raw. Its high pectin and high acid made it a mainstay of preserving before commercial pectin: the word marmalade is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelo, meaning quince, and the earliest marmalades were stiff quince pastes rather than orange conserves. The slow colour change from pale cream to deep rose during long cooking is usually attributed to reactions involving the fruit's phenolic compounds, and is the reason so many older recipes insist on a gentle oven and patience. Its appearance in an early twentieth-century book of earthenware baking dishes fits that period's enthusiasm for such vessels, which could go from oven to table in the same pot.