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Quince and Apple Marmalade
Wash the quinces and remove the blossom end. Cut the fruit in small pieces, add sufficient water to cover it, and cook until it is soft. Rub it through a sieve, and combine the pulp with an equal measure of tart apple pulp. Use two-thirds as much sugar as pulp. Cook until it is thick and clear (about twenty-five minutes). Turn it into clean, hot glasses and when it is cold cover it with hot paraffin.
A two-fruit marmalade built on pulp rather than slices, from an era when quinces were a common autumn fruit. The proportions are given by volume, not weight, which makes the recipe easy to scale but demands that you measure the pulp after sieving.
- Skip the paraffinMelted paraffin poured over the surface is no longer considered a safe seal; the wax shrinks and cracks, letting mold in beneath it. Fill clean half-pint jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, apply two-piece lids and process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath, or refrigerate and use within a month.
- "Glasses" means jarsThe tapered jelly glasses of this period were sealed with wax rather than a lid. Standard half-pint canning jars are the direct replacement.
- Measure pulp, then sugarTwo-thirds as much sugar as pulp means by volume: 2 cups sugar for every 3 cups combined pulp. That is on the lower side of the usual preserving proportions, and it relies on the natural pectin in quince, so do not reduce it further.
- The apple pulp is assumedThe recipe does not tell you to cook the apples. Quarter tart apples without peeling or coring, cook them soft in a little water, and sieve them exactly as the quinces, since the peel and cores carry most of the pectin.
- Quince takes longer than you expectRaw quince is hard and astringent; cut pieces may need 30 to 45 minutes of simmering before they will go through a sieve. Removing the blossom end, as the recipe directs, is the only trimming specified, since the skins soften and sieve out.
- Cooking downTwenty-five minutes is a fair estimate over medium heat in a wide pan, but judge by behavior rather than the clock. Stir constantly toward the end, as sieved fruit purees scorch readily, and stop when a spoon drawn through leaves a track that holds for a moment.
- Color is the signalQuince turns from pale cream to deep rose-amber as it cooks, which is part of what "thick and clear" describes.
Quinces were once a fixture of American kitchen gardens precisely because they are useless raw: too hard and too tart to eat out of hand, but loaded with pectin and aromatic enough to perfume everything cooked with them. That pectin is why quince and apple appear together here, and why the sugar ratio can be lower than in the berry preserves elsewhere in this chapter. The word marmalade descends from the Portuguese marmelo, meaning quince, and the earliest European marmalades were stiff quince pastes, not the citrus preserves the word now suggests; a recipe like this one is closer to the original sense than to breakfast orange marmalade. By the time New Delineator Recipes appeared, quince was already retreating from commercial markets, and household books were among the last places to record the varied uses American cooks had for it.