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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 of the old style, meaning a thick fruit pulp rather than a citrus preserve with peel. The recipe assumes you know how to make apple pulp and how to seal a jelly glass; both need a word.
- The hinge: constant stirringOnce the sugar goes in, a fruit-pulp marmalade this thick will catch and scorch on the bottom in seconds. Use a wide, heavy pan, stir down to the metal continuously, and expect it to spit as it thickens.
- Twenty-five minutes is optimisticThat figure assumes a wide preserving pan and a hot fire. Cook to appearance instead: the mass should mound on a spoon, hold a channel when you draw the spoon across the pan bottom, and turn translucent. On a domestic hob this often takes 40 minutes or more.
- Preparing the quincesRub off the grey fuzz, cut out the blossom and stem ends, and cut up the fruit skin, core and all. The seeds and skins carry most of the pectin, and the sieve removes them later. Quince flesh is hard; slice thin or the initial cooking drags on.
- The apple pulpMake it the same way: tart apples quartered with skins and cores, barely covered with water, cooked soft and sieved. Cooking apples such as Bramley, Granny Smith or any sharp windfall give the acid the set depends on.
- "Equal measure" and "two-thirds as much sugar"These are volume ratios, not weights. Measure the sieved pulps in a jug: for every 4 cups of combined pulp use about 2 2/3 cups of sugar. That is less sugar than many modern preserving recipes call for.
- "Glasses"Squat straight-sided jelly glasses, usually holding six to eight ounces. Any half-pint canning jar stands in. Heat them before filling so they do not crack.
- Paraffin is no longer usedA poured wax cap was standard in 1900 and is not recommended now: the wax shrinks and cracks as it cools, letting in air and mould. Fill hot into clean half-pint jars, seal with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath, or refrigerate the jars and eat within a few weeks.
- YieldAbout 2 lb each of quinces and tart apples gives roughly four half-pint jars. The original gives no quantities at all.
Quince is the original marmalade fruit: the word traces to the Portuguese marmelo, quince, and the earliest marmalades imported into northern Europe were dense sliceable quince pastes, closer to Spanish membrillo than to anything spread on toast. By the time Butterick collected its recipes in the early twentieth century, "marmalade" in an American kitchen was often used for a thick sieved fruit pulp cooked down with sugar as well as for citrus preserves, and the quince still earned its place because it was a common dooryard tree fruit, rarely eaten raw and full of pectin. Pairing it with tart apples was practical thrift as much as flavour: apples were cheap and plentiful, they stretched a small quince crop, and their acid helped the set. The reliance on hot paraffin is characteristic of home preserving of the period, when a poured wax cap was a common way of closing jelly glasses.