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Quince Jelly
Follow recipe for Apple Jelly, using quinces in place of apples, and removing seeds from fruit. Quince parings are often used for jelly, the better part of the fruit being used for canning.
This is a cross-reference recipe: Farmer expects you to have the Apple Jelly method in hand and simply swap the fruit. Here is what that method assumes, and where quince behaves differently.
- The parent methodApple Jelly in this book means: cut the fruit up without peeling or coring, barely cover with cold water, cook until soft, drain through a jelly bag without squeezing, boil the juice, then add heated sugar and boil until it jellies. Check the book's own Apple Jelly entry for its exact sugar proportion and boiling time. By modern jelly guidance the set falls at about 220F, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you live.
- Remove the seedsFarmer's one addition to the apple method is the instruction to seed the fruit, and it is the hinge of the recipe. Quince seeds are mucilaginous and will make the juice slimy and cloudy rather than clear; they also carry a trace of cyanogenic compound, as apple and pear pips do. Take the core out, keep the peel.
- Parings and cores are the pointParings and cores -- quince skin and core carry more pectin and more of the fruit's aroma than the flesh does, so the trimmings left from canning quarters make good jelly. Farmer's framing is frugal: the sound flesh goes into the canning jars, the parings into the jelly bag.
- Quince needs no added pectinQuince is among the highest-pectin fruits in the kitchen, which is why it sets reliably on the apple formula. If anything the risk is overcooking to a rubbery set, so begin testing for the set early rather than boiling to a fixed time.
- Cooking time for the fruitRaw quince is hard and astringent and takes considerably longer to break down than apple, often 40 minutes to an hour of simmering. Cook until the pieces collapse; long cooking also turns the flesh and liquid pink or amber.
- Do not squeeze the bagStraining overnight and resisting the urge to press produces clear jelly. Pressed juice carries fine pulp that clouds the finished jar, and with quince, which is prized for its translucence, this is the difference between a good jelly and a merely edible one.
- SealingPeriod practice was to pour into tumblers and cover with melted paraffin. Current guidance is to fill hot sterilized half-pint jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or simply refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
- YieldThe book gives none. Roughly 4 lb of quinces yields about 4 cups of juice, which with sugar makes five or six half-pint jars.
Quince was a standard fruit in nineteenth-century American gardens and largely disappeared from them in the twentieth, which is why a book from 1896 can treat quince jelly as too obvious to need its own instructions while a modern cook has to hunt for the fruit. It is almost inedible raw and depends entirely on cooking, which turns the hard white flesh pink and releases a perfume somewhere between apple, pear and rose. Its very high pectin content made it the reliable jelly fruit before commercial pectin was sold, and it was often cooked together with apples or added to other fruits purely to make them set. The line about using the parings is characteristic of Fannie Farmer and of the Boston Cooking School's whole outlook: the sound flesh goes into canning jars for winter fruit, and nothing that carries flavor is thrown away.