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Quince Honey
2 pounds quince 4 pounds sugar Dissolve sugar in about 1½ cups water. Pare quince and put through fine food chopper. Add to the dissolved sugar and cook very slowly until thick. Put in jelly glasses.
— Mabel Barton
A two-ingredient preserve that depends entirely on how far you cook it. Quince has abundant natural pectin and acid, so the sugar syrup will set on its own if you take it far enough.
- Ratio and yieldRatio -- Two parts sugar to one part fruit by weight is very sweet even by preserve standards, and it is what gives the finished spread its clear amber body.
- "Put through fine food chopper"A hand-cranked grinder with the fine plate. A food processor pulsed to a coarse pulp, or the large holes of a box grater, gives the same result. Do not purée to a smooth slurry or the honey will be pasty rather than translucent.
- Core it as well as pare itThe recipe says only to pare, but quince cores are stony and full of hard grit cells. Quarter, peel, and cut the core out before grinding. The peels and cores can be simmered separately in water for a pectin-rich liquid if you want to use them.
- Quince is hardRaw quince is dense enough to be difficult to cut. Use a heavy knife on a stable board, and expect the flesh to discolor quickly once cut; with long slow cooking it may darken to rose or deep amber.
- "Cook very slowly"This is the hinge. The mixture scorches easily at this sugar concentration, so use a wide heavy pot over low heat and stir often as it thickens, particularly toward the end.
- Knowing when it is thickThe period test is a spoonful that sheets or a drop that holds shape on a cold plate. On a candy thermometer, 220F at sea level is the standard jelly point.
- Jelly glassesThese were sealed with a disc of melted paraffin poured over the surface, a method no longer recommended because the wax seal can crack and admit mold. Use modern canning jars, either refrigerated and eaten within a few weeks, or processed in a boiling water bath according to current tested times for fruit preserves.
- TextureDespite the name, this is not a jelly. It is a soft, spreadable conserve with the fine grated fruit suspended in it, closer to a marmalade without peel.
Quince was a standard American dooryard fruit well into the twentieth century, planted as much for its pectin as for its flavor: too hard and astringent to eat raw, but a reliable setter of jellies and a source of perfume for apple preserves. "Honey" here means texture and color rather than any bee product; the same naming logic gave nineteenth-century cooks apple honey and pear honey, all of them heavy sugar-and-fruit spreads. Recipes for such household preserves were often recorded under the maker's own name. Quince trees fell out of favor for a number of reasons, among them the arrival of commercial pectin, which is why the fruit is now a specialty item and this recipe reads as unfamiliar.