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Quince Pudding
Boil seven large quinces until they are very soft; peel, core and mash them, then add the yolks of four eggs beaten together with one pint of cream. Sweeten the mixture to taste, and flavor it with a little powdered ginger and cinnamon. Butter the edges of a pie-dish, place a strip of puff paste round it, pour in the pudding, and bake in a moderate oven for forty-five minutes. When cooked sift powdered sugar over, and serve with a rich custard.
A baked custard set with quince pulp, from an era when quinces were a common autumn fruit rather than a specialty-market find. Nothing here is difficult, but the fruit takes far longer to cook than the recipe implies.
- The hinge: cook the quinces properlyQuince flesh is hard, dry and astringent raw, and it needs long, gentle simmering — often 45 minutes to well over an hour depending on ripeness — before it will mash smoothly. Under-cooked quince stays gritty and the pudding will never be silky. With long cooking the flesh may turn from pale cream to pink or amber, though this varies by variety and is not by itself a test of doneness; judge by softness.
- Quantity of fruitSeven large quinces is a great deal — roughly 4 lb whole, yielding perhaps 3 to 4 cups of pulp once peeled and cored. That is generous against a pint of cream and four yolks; two to three cups of pulp gives a custard that sets rather than a dense fruit paste. Reduce the fruit if you want the eggs to do their work.
- "A moderate oven"350F. At that heat, forty-five minutes is reasonable for a shallow pie-dish; the centre should be just set with a slight wobble.
- Pint of creamAn American pint, 2 cups. Heavy cream gives a very rich result; half cream, half whole milk lightens it alongside the custard sauce served with it, though the recipe as written calls for cream throughout.
- The strip of puff pasteThis is a decorative rim, not a lined crust — a band of puff pastry pressed round the buttered edge of the dish, which puffs and browns as a collar. Butter the rim well or it will stick and tear when cut.
- Sweetening"To taste" is doing real work here, since quince is sharp. Sweeten the warm pulp before adding the eggs; the recipe gives no quantity, so start with a modest amount and taste as you go, adjusting on a cooled spoonful before the mixture goes in the dish.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally means finely ground sugar for sifting over — modern confectioners' sugar is the closest equivalent.
- YieldGenerous: the full quantities make considerably more than a 9-inch pie-dish will hold, so either use a larger or deeper dish or reduce the fruit as suggested above. Serves six to eight, particularly with the accompanying custard sauce.
Quinces were once a kitchen staple across Europe and colonial America in large part because of their keeping qualities: hard, sour and full of pectin, they were generally cooked, and in return they gave jellies, cheeses and marmalades that kept through winter. The word marmalade itself descends from marmelo, the Portuguese for quince. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his book at the turn of the twentieth century the fruit was already sliding out of fashion in American markets, displaced by apples and pears that could be eaten out of hand, and quince recipes in cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s often read as survivals from an older domestic tradition. The construction here — fruit pulp bound with yolks and cream, spiced with ginger and cinnamon, baked in a dish edged with pastry — is an English pudding form of considerable age, and one said to have been made with apple, pear and orange as well as quince.