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Quince Marmalade
Wipe quinces, remove blossom ends, cut in quarters, remove seeds; then cut in small pieces. Put into a preserving kettle, and add enough water to nearly cover. Cook slowly until soft. Rub through a hair sieve, and add three-fourths its measure of heated sugar. Cook slowly twenty minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. Put in tumblers. Orange Marmalade I Select sour, smooth-skinned oranges. Weigh oranges, and allow three-fourths their weight in cut sugar. Remove peel from oranges in quarters. Cook peel until soft in enough boiling water to cover; drain, remove white part from peel by scraping it with a spoon. Cut thin yellow rind in strips, using a pair of scissors. This is more quickly accomplished by cutting through two or three pieces at a time. Divide oranges in sections, remove seeds and tough part of the skin. Put into a preserving kettle and heat to boiling-point, add sugar gradually, and cook slowly one hour; add rind, and cook one hour longer. Turn into glasses.
Two recipes have run together in this entry: the quince marmalade proper, and the first of Farmer's orange marmalades that followed it on the page. Both are straightforward if you know what the old vessels and sugar terms mean.
- The hinge: don't skip the long soft-cookQuinces are hard, dry and astringent raw, and they will not break down in twenty minutes. Simmer them gently, covered, until a piece crushes with no resistance — usually 40 minutes to an hour — before you go anywhere near the sieve. Rushing this stage is the one thing that ruins the batch.
- Skins and cores stay inFarmer removes only blossom ends and seeds, so the peel and core go into the kettle; they carry much of the fruit's pectin. The sieve catches them afterward. The pale pulp often turns amber to rose during the sugar cooking, which is a sign of progress rather than scorching.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — enameled cast iron or stainless. Period kettles were variously copper (usually tinned), brass or enamelled ware; avoid bare copper and avoid aluminum, since the fruit acid attacks both.
- Hair sieveA horsehair sieve was the fine mesh of the period. Use a food mill or a stainless sieve and a stiff rubber spatula. A food processor will not substitute, as the point is to leave grit, skin and core behind.
- "Three-fourths its measure of heated sugar"Measure the sieved pulp by volume, then use three-quarters that volume of sugar — 3 cups sugar to 4 cups pulp. Warming the sugar in a low oven first keeps the boil from stalling. In the orange recipe "cut sugar" means loaf sugar broken into lumps; use ordinary granulated by weight, three-quarters the weight of the whole fruit.
- Judge by set, not by clockTwenty minutes is a fair guide for a small batch but nothing more. Cook to 220F on a candy thermometer, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Quince is so rich in pectin that it can set very quickly and turn stiff and dull if pushed too far.
- "Put in tumblers" is not modern canningThe preserve went hot into drinking or jelly glasses, which were commonly sealed with melted paraffin or with dipped paper covers. Neither method is recommended now. Fill hot sterilized canning jars, leave a quarter-inch of headspace, and either process in a boiling-water bath or simply refrigerate and use within a month or two.
- YieldNeither recipe says. Three pounds of quinces gives roughly four half-pint jars; the orange marmalade, from about two pounds of fruit, gives three to four.
- Orange marmalade timingTwo hours of slow cooking is a long haul by modern standards; check the set from about the ninety-minute mark. Adding the shredded rind only in the second hour keeps the strips intact and translucent instead of dissolving into the pulp.
Marmalade began as quince, not orange: the word comes through French from Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste made from marmelo, the quince, and recorded in England from the late fifteenth century as a sweetmeat cut in slices rather than a spread. Only later did the name migrate to the citrus preserves that now monopolize it — which is why Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book can print quince marmalade and orange marmalade back to back without comment. Quinces were a common dooryard tree in nineteenth-century New England, valuable precisely because the fruit is inedible raw and keeps for weeks in a cold room, so it could be worked up into jelly, marmalade and honey through the autumn. Their high pectin and acid made them one of the household setting agents used before commercial pectin was sold, and some old recipes stretch a weak-setting fruit by cooking it with quince or apple parings.