Home › Salads and Dressings › Quinces
Quinces
Pare, core and quarter the quinces or cut them into rings. Throw them at once into cold water. Save the parings and knotted pieces for jelly, being careful to reject the core and seeds, as they contain mucilage which prevents the liquid jellying. Remember there is a difference between jelly and mucilage. When you pare sufficient to make two jars, take the pieces from the water, put in a porcelain-lined kettle, cover with boiling water and boil until tender. While they are cooking, put the sugar and water in another kettle, allowing half a pound of sugar to half a pint of water for each pound of quinces. Boil and skim. Lift the quinces from the water, put them in the syrup and simmer gently. They should scarcely bubble until the quinces are clear and of a bright red color. White quinces may look beautiful, but they are certainly inferior in taste.
If canning several jars of quinces, they should all be boiled in the same water and this water saved to boil with the skins and knotted pieces for jelly. Fresh syrup must, of course, be made for each lot, as you will have only enough to fill the jar.
The cooking method here is sound and still worth reading, but the preserving instructions are not. The recipe fills jars with hot fruit and syrup and stops there, with no processing step, no headspace, no seal test and no times.
- Why the canning failsThis is open-kettle canning: hot syrup and fruit are ladled into jars and left to seal on their own. The jars are not held at any measured temperature for any measured time, so anything that lands in them between kettle and lid — mould spores, wild yeasts, bacteria from the jar rim — survives. Seals made this way also fail silently months later. Use a current tested recipe for quinces in syrup if you intend to put them up.
- Cooking a few for immediate eating is another matterQuinces poached in sugar syrup and eaten within a few days in the refrigerator raise none of the storage problems. The caution is about the jars, not the fruit.
- The syrup ratioHalf a pound of sugar to half a pint of water per pound of quinces works out to roughly 1 generous cup of granulated sugar and 1 cup of water for each pound of prepared fruit.
- Porcelain-lined kettleAn enamelled or stainless pan. Quinces are acidic and full of tannin; bare cast iron, aluminium or copper will dull the colour and can throw a metallic taste.
- Cold water at onceNot fussiness. Cut quince browns faster than apple, and the flesh is hard enough that paring a batch takes real time. Acidulating the water with a little lemon juice helps further.
- On the seeds and "mucilage"The author is right that quince seeds are slippery — quince-seed mucilage was sold as a hair and skin dressing well into the twentieth century — but the peels and knotted pieces the recipe saves are rich in pectin, as are the cores it tells you to discard. Save the parings and trimmings for jelly as instructed; leave the seeds out.
- The red colourIt develops mainly through long, very slow cooking rather than from the variety: quince tannins darken to pink and then to deep red over an hour or more of bare simmering. Rushing the heat gives pale, firm, sour fruit.
- RipenessQuinces are inedibly hard and astringent raw and should be fully yellow and strongly fragrant before use. Any green cast means more cooking time and less colour.
Quince is the fruit that gave marmalade its name: the Portuguese marmelo, quince, produced marmelada, a stiff paste of quince and sugar that had reached England by the end of the fifteenth century, long before anyone thought of doing the same with Seville oranges. Because the raw fruit is hard, sour and full of tannin, much of its historical use was in preserves of some kind — or fruit poached in syrup as here — though it also turned up in meat dishes, tarts and pies, and its high natural pectin made it the standard setting agent in kitchens that had no commercial pectin to buy. The confident aside about white versus red quinces is a period commonplace, and colour was often said to be earned by patience at the stove.