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Quince Sauce
1 quart peeled and quartered quinces 2 cups sugar 2 quarts peeled and quartered apples Water to cover Cook until tender.
A plain stewed-fruit sauce of the kind meant to be spooned beside a pudding or eaten with cream. The proportions are loose by design, but two details in the original need translating.
- Quinces cook far slower than applesRaw quince is hard and astringent and needs 30-45 minutes of simmering to soften; apples collapse in 10-15. Start the quinces alone in the water and sugar, then add the apples once the quince pieces yield to a knife tip, or the apples will be sauce long before the quinces are edible.
- Quantities by volumeA quart of peeled, quartered quinces is roughly 1 1/4-1 1/2 lb of prepared fruit; two quarts of apples is about 2 1/2-3 lb. Buy around 2 lb whole quinces and 3 1/2 lb whole apples to allow for peel and core.
- "Water to cover"Use just enough to come level with the fruit; in a wide pan that may be only three or four cups, though it depends on the pan and how closely the fruit packs. Any more and you finish with syrup and floating fruit rather than sauce; if it looks thin at the end, lift the fruit out and boil the liquid down.
- SugarTwo cups is generous by current taste for this much fruit. Quince is tart and apples vary, so start with one cup, taste once the quinces are tender, and add more then. Sugar added early also slows the softening of the fruit slightly.
- Cores and peels are worth keepingQuince cores and skins are heavy in pectin and will thicken the sauce and deepen its colour. Tie them in muslin, simmer them with the fruit, and lift the bag out before serving.
- The colour changeLong, gentle cooking turns quince from pale cream to pink or deep amber. It is a useful sign that the fruit has had enough time, though tenderness tested with a knife tip is the surer test, and a fast boil is less likely to produce the colour.
- PanUse a non-reactive pan, stainless or enamelled. Quince is acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined copper.
- Yield and keepingAbout 6 cups, serving eight to ten as a dessert sauce. Refrigerated it keeps a week; the recipe gives no canning instructions, so treat it as a fresh sauce rather than a preserve.
Quinces were a common dooryard fruit in Britain and North America well into the twentieth century, valued precisely because they are useless raw: too hard and too astringent to eat out of hand, but full of pectin and perfume once cooked, which is why the word marmalade descends through Portuguese marmelo, quince. Pairing quince with apples, as here, is the old household economy of the thing, the apples supply bulk and sweetness while a smaller amount of quince supplies scent and body. Quince largely vanished from American kitchens after mid-century, for reasons usually said to include the fruit's long cooking time and the decline of the trees themselves, though the causes are not well documented.