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Canned Quinces
Wipe, quarter, core, and pare quinces. Follow Directions for Canning. Quinces may be cooked with an equal weight of sweet apples wiped, quartered, cored, and paired; in this case use no extra sugar for apples.
This entry is a cross-reference rather than a complete method: it sends the cook to the book's general "Directions for Canning," which in 1896 meant the open-kettle technique — hot fruit ladled into hot jars and sealed, with no timed processing of the filled jar. That gap is why the page cannot be followed today.
- No processing time or temperatureNothing on this page specifies how long the filled jars are held at boiling; the method is delegated entirely to the book's general "Directions for Canning," which are not reproduced here. Without a measured process there is no way to know the jar interior reached a temperature that destroys spoilage organisms.
- Open-kettle sealing failsFilling and capping hot jars produces a vacuum that may hold for a time and then fail, and the headspace can be recontaminated by air and utensils during filling. For these reasons the method is no longer recommended for home canning.
- The apple variation shifts the acidityQuince is a strongly acid fruit; sweet apples are less so, and the recipe gives no measurement to control the proportion or the syrup. Both fruits are still acid foods, but the pack is unquantified. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority instead.
- "Sweet apples" is not a modern category"Sweet apples" is not a modern market category -- The book means low-acid, non-tart apples rather than any named cultivar. Such varieties still exist but are uncommon in shops today, so the proportions are hard to reproduce exactly.
- Why quinces were canned at allWhy quinces were cooked -- Most quince is hard and astringent raw and is one of the few fruits generally cooked before eating; long heat turns the flesh from cream to pink. Preserving was a normal way to use an autumn crop.
- "Paired" is a typesetting errorThe second sentence reads "cored, and paired" where the first reads "core, and pare." Both mean pared -- peeled. Quince peel is tough and does not soften in the jar.
Quinces were a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens and were rarely eaten raw; their high pectin and acid made them a household standby for jelly, marmalade and preserves before commercial pectin was sold from the 1910s. The science of processing -- timed heat applied to the sealed jar, and the distinction between high- and low-acid foods -- was worked out later, largely through agricultural experiment stations and extension bulletins in the first half of the twentieth century; open-kettle filling continued to be printed in cookbooks well past 1896. The terseness of this entry is itself a period marker: the reader is assumed to have the general directions in hand and needs only to be told that quince can be stretched with apple.