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Stewed Quinces
Peel and core a dozen ripe quinces, cut them into quarters and put them into a saucepan with one pint of cold water, and one-half pound of granulated sugar. Put the pan on the stove, and when the contents boil skim well, and cook for fifteen minutes, stirring gently from the bottom to avoid mashing the fruit. Take it from the fire, and immediately add one gill of maraschino; stir lightly again, pour the preparation into a bowl to cool, and serve on a dish.
A compote of the plainest sort, redeemed by a slug of maraschino stirred in off the heat. The one thing to distrust is the cooking time.
- Fifteen minutes is not enoughQuinces are dense and astringent raw, and unlike apples they do not collapse. Expect 30 to 50 minutes at a bare simmer before the quarters are tender enough to yield to a knife tip; Oscar's timing suits only very ripe, small fruit. Test rather than trust the clock.
- A gill of maraschinoA gill is half a cup, which is a generous pour for a dozen quinces. Maraschino here means the clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur (Luxardo is the surviving benchmark), not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Half that amount is enough for most palates.
- Off the heat, alwaysThe liqueur goes in after the pan leaves the fire so the aromatics do not boil off. If you reduce the syrup, do it before the maraschino, not after.
- Peeling and coringQuince flesh is hard enough to blunt a peeler. Use a sharp knife, quarter the fruit first, then pare and cut out the gritty core. Save peels and cores in a muslin bag dropped into the pan: they are full of pectin and will thicken the syrup slightly.
- Sugar and waterHalf a pound of granulated sugar is about one cup; a pint is two cups. That is a light syrup, so the fruit stays tart. Keep the quarters just covered and top up with hot water if the level drops.
- ColourQuinces turn from pale yellow to amber and finally rose with long cooking, a change usually put down to their phenolic compounds altering under prolonged heat. Fifteen minutes leaves them straw-coloured; the pink that people associate with quince comes only after the longer simmer.
- Yield and servingA dozen quinces is roughly four pounds of fruit and will serve eight to twelve. Serve cool, in the syrup, alone or with thick cream; it also keeps several days refrigerated.
Quinces were a standard American fruit in Oscar Tschirky's day, grown in kitchen gardens and orchards for jelly, marmalade and preserves because they are almost unusable raw. The word marmalade itself comes from marmelo, Portuguese for quince, and the earliest marmalades were quince pastes rather than orange conserves. What marks this as a Waldorf recipe rather than a farmhouse one is the maraschino: a fashionable imported liqueur from the Adriatic, made from marasca cherries and their crushed stones, which turned up all through late nineteenth-century hotel cookery as a finishing note on fruit, ices and punches. The dish is essentially a domestic compote given a restaurant's flourish at the last moment, which is a fair description of much of Oscar's book. Quinces fell out of American home cooking through the twentieth century as commercial fruit growing narrowed to what could be eaten out of hand.