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Canned Quinces
2 quarts quinces 3 cups sugar 1 quart water Wash and drain the quinces; pare, quarter and core them and drop the pieces into cold water to which a little lemon juice has been added. Put the fruit over the fire with cold water to cover it; heat slowly and simmer gently until the fruit is tender. With a silver fork remove each piece as soon as it is tender and drain them on a platter. Strain the water in which the fruit was cooked; put one quart of it in the kettle with the sugar; bring to a boil and skim. Add the cooked fruit and boil gently for about twenty minutes.
A straightforward fruit-in-syrup preserve, written for a period when "canned" meant the fruit was packed hot into jars and sealed without any stated processing step. The cooking itself is sound; the storage instructions are the part that has been superseded.
- Sealing and storageThe recipe stops at the boiling syrup and never says how to fill, seal or process the jars. Do not improvise that step: follow a current tested water-bath schedule for quinces in syrup, or simply treat this as stewed fruit, refrigerate it and eat it within a week.
- QuantitiesThe recipe does not say whether the two quarts are measured before or after paring and coring. Reckon on somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 lb of whole fruit. No jar yield is given.
- Cutting themRaw quince is dense and unyielding, closer to a turnip than an apple. Use a heavy, sharp knife on a stable board and quarter the fruit before attempting the core; the core is gritty and stony and should be cut out generously.
- The acidulated waterQuince flesh browns within a minute or two of being cut. The lemon-water bath is not optional if you want a clear pale syrup rather than a muddy one.
- "Silver fork"Silver was specified because ordinary iron and tinned forks discoloured acidic fruit. Stainless steel does the job now. The real point of the instruction is to lift each piece the moment it turns tender, since quinces go from firm to collapsed quickly and unevenly.
- Simmering timeThe first cooking is given no clock reading because it varies enormously with ripeness — anywhere from 20 minutes to well over an hour. Test with a skewer rather than a timer, and expect pieces from the same fruit to finish at different moments.
- ColourThe twenty minutes in syrup does more than sweeten. Quince tannins and sugar together shift the fruit from cream towards amber, and with longer cooking it can go pink or deep rose, though how far it goes depends on the fruit and the time given it.
- Save the peels and coresThey are the richest source of pectin in the fruit. Simmered separately in the cooking water and strained out, they give a syrup with noticeably more body — the same trick behind quince jelly.
Quince was a standard autumn preserving fruit in Anglo-American kitchens well into the twentieth century, valued precisely because it is inedible raw: hard, astringent and aromatic, it demands the long sugar cooking that makes it keep. Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in the loose-leaf format that let a housekeeper add and reorder pages. The fruit's high natural pectin and acid made it a traditional base for jellies and marmalades — the word marmalade is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelo, meaning quince — and its drift out of American home orchards over the past century may be part of why a recipe this ordinary now reads as exotic.