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Canned Quinces
1 pint water 2 pounds sugar Cook sugar and water until syrupy. Pare and quarter quinces; let stand in cold water. Cook in boiling water until tender, then cook in sugar and water syrup five minutes. Arrange quinces in jars, fill with syrup, and seal.
A plain open-kettle canning formula of the sort standard before processing times were established. The syrup and the fruit handling are sound; the sealing method is the problem.
- Why this fails as writtenThe jars are filled and sealed with no processing in a boiling-water canner. Open-kettle canning relies on the heat of the syrup alone to sterilize the jar and pull a seal, and it routinely fails: air and microorganisms enter as the fruit is packed, and a weak or false seal can go unnoticed for months. Current tested procedures for canned quinces should be used instead.
- No quantity of fruit is givenThe recipe specifies 1 pint water and 2 pounds sugar and leaves the quince entirely unstated, which makes it impossible to scale or to judge headspace. That silence is typical of the period and is another reason to work from a measured modern procedure.
- The syrup is very heavyTwo pounds of sugar to a pint of water is roughly a 2:1 ratio by weight, far heavier than the light or medium syrups used for canned fruit now. It was doing preservative work as much as sweetening.
- Cook sugar and water until syrupyMeaning simply until the sugar has dissolved and the liquid has thickened slightly on boiling. It is not a candy stage and no thermometer reading is intended.
- Standing in cold waterPared quince browns quickly. The cold-water holding bath is oxidation control and is still worth doing; acidulating the water with lemon juice works better.
- Quince is not eaten rawEven ripe fruit is hard, astringent and full of stone cells. The preliminary boil until tender can take roughly 20 to 40 minutes depending on ripeness; with longer cooking the pale cream flesh may turn amber or pink, though a short boil to tenderness often leaves it barely coloured.
- Do not throw out the peel and coresThey carry much of the pectin and perfume. Simmered in the cooking water and strained, they give a jelly stock, a use found in period preserving directions.
Quince was a fixture of the American preserving closet long after it disappeared from the fresh fruit stall, precisely because it does badly everything a dessert apple does well and superbly everything a preserve needs: it is hard, sour, aromatic and extraordinarily high in pectin. The word marmalade descends from the Portuguese marmelo, quince, and originally meant a stiff quince paste rather than anything made with citrus. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of the early 1900s it padded out its chocolate work with a full general household repertoire, preserving included. Its terse, unprocessed canning directions reflect standard practice before the boiling-water bath and tested processing times became the norm in home kitchens.