Baked Quinces
Wash, quarter, core and pare the quinces. Place them, cut side up, in a shallow baking dish, filling the cavities with sugar, up, in a shallow baking dish, filling the cavities with sugar, mixed with a little grated lemon rind or lemon juice. Cover the bottom of the dish with water and bake in a moderate oven until soft, basting frequently. Serve hot with butter and sugar.
A plain baked fruit that asks for more patience than the wording suggests: quince flesh is dense and stony raw, and it will not soften on a timetable borrowed from apples.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350-375F. Quinces at that heat need anywhere from about 45 minutes to well over an hour depending on size and ripeness; test with a knife tip rather than a clock.
- Paring is hard workRaw quince is tough enough to blunt a vegetable peeler. Use a sharp paring knife, and quarter the fruit before coring — the core is fibrous and gritty and needs cutting out rather than scooping.
- The hinge is the bastingWith only a film of water in the dish and sugar in every cavity, the syrup reduces fast. Baste every ten to fifteen minutes and top up with a spoonful of hot water if the pan threatens to go dry and scorch.
- Sugar quantityNone is given. Reckon on about a tablespoon per quarter, which is generous but appropriate — quince is astringent and low in free sugar, and undersweetened it stays puckery.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith turns bitter over a long bake. A teaspoon of zest or the juice of half a lemon is enough for four fruit.
- Colour is the doneness cueColour -- Quinces often turn from pale cream to pink or amber over a long bake, a shift usually attributed to their tannins under prolonged heat. Treat it as a bonus rather than a test: judge doneness by softness with a knife tip, as the recipe directs.
- Typesetting slipThe phrase "filling the cavities with sugar, up, in a shallow baking dish, filling the cavities with sugar" is plainly a duplication in the printed text. Read it once.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of fruit, so no yield can be stated. Serve hot, as directed - cooled, the sugary juices stiffen toward a jelly.
Quince was a standing feature of American and British kitchens well into the twentieth century, valued less for eating raw — it is almost inedible that way — than for the pectin and perfume it brought to preserves; the word marmalade is generally traced to marmelo, Portuguese for quince, and the earliest marmalades were quince pastes rather than orange conserves. Quince belonged to the sugar chapter because that is where the household met it, in jelly, in cheese, in candied slices. Baked whole or quartered with sugar it is the simplest possible use of the fruit, and one that survived in home cooking long after commercial jam made quince jelly optional. The variety gradually receded from grocery stores as apples and pears took the shelf space, which is why a recipe that once needed no explanation now needs a paragraph.