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Quince Marmalade
Pare, core, and weigh the quinces, allowing sugar as for rhubarb marmalade. Drop the fruit into clear water as soon as the core is removed, to prevent it from turning black from exposure. Stew the parings and cores slowly for three hours in just enough water to cover them, and strain through a bag made of coarse linen cloth, squeezing it at the last to obtain all the juices of the fruit and the gelatinous substance of the cores. Much trouble will be saved if this part of the work is done one day and the marmalade finished the next. Put the quinces in the kettle with the water strained from the parings, and boil them until the fruit has been broken and well crushed-usually three-quarters of an hour.
Add the sugar, and boil ten minutes longer, skimming if necessary. Put in glasses and cover.
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A two-day method that extracts pectin from the peels and cores before the fruit is cooked, which is what gives quince marmalade its set. Read the sugar instruction carefully before you start.
- The sugar quantity is a cross-reference"sugar as for rhubarb marmalade" points to a companion entry that is not reproduced here. Equal weights, one pound of sugar to one pound of prepared fruit, is a common period proportion for marmalades of this kind, but treat it as a working assumption rather than a certainty until you can check the companion recipe.
- The cores are the pectinThe three-hour simmer of parings and cores is not thrift, it is the setting agent. Quince seeds and skin are unusually rich in pectin, and skipping this step gives a loose, syrupy result. Do not crack or crush the seeds. Note that the recipe does direct you to squeeze the bag at the last, which extracts more pectin at the cost of some clarity.
- Why the fruit blackensCut quince oxidises fast. Water alone slows it; a tablespoon of lemon juice per quart slows it further and does no harm to the flavour.
- Peeling is the hard partRaw quince is dense and slippery. A sturdy vegetable peeler and a heavy knife, and quartering before coring, saves knuckles. Reckon on a good deal more time than for apples of the same weight.
- Timings are approximateThree-quarters of an hour to break down the fruit assumes ripe, fully aromatic quinces; hard early-season fruit can take well over an hour. Cook until the pieces collapse under a spoon, then add sugar.
- Judging the setTen minutes after the sugar goes in is a starting point, not a finish line. Look for 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles on a chilled plate. The colour will deepen from pale yellow through pink to deep amber-red as it cooks, which is normal and desirable.
- "Put in glasses and cover"In 1911 that meant tumblers sealed with melted paraffin or brandied paper. Use standard canning jars, fill to a quarter-inch of the rim, and process in a boiling water bath for ten minutes, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
Quince is the original marmalade fruit: the word comes through French from Portuguese marmelada, a stiff paste of quinces (marmelo), and only later attached itself to citrus. The fruit was a fixture of American farm dooryards through the nineteenth century, and it is often said that this owed something to its being nearly inedible raw but keeping well cooked, and to its high pectin and acid, which made it a reliable setter in an age before commercial pectin was sold in packets. A recipe like this one, which harvests the gelatinous substance of the cores rather than throwing it out, belongs to that pre-Certo world. By the time the Butterick book appeared, quince is generally thought to have been losing ground in American gardens, and the fruit's slow slide toward novelty status had begun.