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Preserved Quinces
4 pounds sugar boiling water Wash, wipe, pare, core, and cut quinces in quarters. Put in preserving kettle, cover with boiling water. Simmer until tender. Cool on platters. Mix sugar with one pint of water in which quinces have been cooked; boil ten minutes. Add quinces a few at a time, cover kettle, and cook slowly until quinces are of a rich red color. Fill jars with quinces, then with boiling syrup, and seal.
One half quinces and one half apples may be used in this recipe.
A straightforward two-stage preserve: the fruit is cooked tender in water first, then finished slowly in a heavy syrup until it turns the deep garnet color quince is prized for. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how much fruit goes with four pounds of sugar.
- How much fruitThe original gives only the sugar. Roughly equal weights work: about 4 lb of quinces as prepared (pared, cored, quartered), which means buying 5 to 6 lb whole. Less sugar than that and the syrup will not set or keep well.
- Quinces are hardRaw quince resists a knife far more than apple. Halve them through the stem end with a heavy chef's knife on a stable board, then quarter and cut out the stony core. A vegetable peeler handles the skin better than a paring knife.
- Save the cores and peelsTie them in cheesecloth and simmer with the fruit in the first cooking. They are where most of the pectin sits, and the pint of cooking water called for in the syrup will be much better for it.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan: enameled cast iron or stainless. Bare cast iron will dull the color and pick up metallic flavor from the fruit acid.
- The red color is the whole pointQuince turns from pale yellow to amber to rose-red only with prolonged gentle heat, over an hour of slow cooking in the syrup in many cases. Rushing at a hard boil gives you tender fruit that stays straw-colored and a syrup that scorches. Keep it at a bare simmer, covered, and check the color rather than the clock.
- Cool on plattersThe recipe pauses here to spread the cooked quarters out to cool. The likely reason is to let them firm up before they go back into the syrup, which helps them hold their shape rather than breaking down.
- SealingFilling hot jars and sealing them, with no further processing, is the open-kettle method and is no longer the accepted practice. Pack the hot fruit and syrup into hot sterilized jars, leaving the headspace current guidance specifies for fruit in syrup (about half an inch), and process in a boiling-water bath according to that guidance for your jar size and altitude, or simply refrigerate and eat within a month.
- The apple variationHalf apples was probably an economy or stretching measure. Use a firm cooking apple and add it later than the quince; it will be tender long before the quince has taken color.
Quince was a dooryard fruit in nineteenth-century America and almost never eaten raw, being hard, astringent and gritty until heat and sugar transform it. Its high pectin and its habit of turning red on long cooking made it the preserving fruit of choice long before commercial pectin was sold, and the word marmalade descends from marmelo, Portuguese for quince, a reminder that the original marmalades were quince pastes rather than orange. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in the early 1900s, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company as a general household manual rather than a chocolate pamphlet alone, quince was already slipping out of American orchards in favor of apples and pears, which may explain the suggestion here that half the fruit may be apple.