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Sugared Quinces
Select good, firm quinces, rub them over with a damp cloth in order to remove the dust, cut each one into eight pieces and remove the cores. Place the quinces in a preserving-pan on the stove, pour over them enough boiling water to cover, and allow them to boil slowly until they are tender; then drain off the water and let them get cold. Weigh the quinces and allow an equal weight of sugar. The peels and cores should have been tied in a muslin bag and boiled with the quinces. When the quinces are quite cold put them and the sugar into glass or earthenware jars in alternate layers, first sugar, then quinces, and so on and cover. When covering make sure that the air is entirely excluded. Look at them from time to time to see whether any show signs of fermentation; if there is any, place the jars in a pan of hot water and loosen the covers, let the water boil until the quinces are well scalded, then cover the jars down carefully as before.
This is a cold-pack sugar preserve with no measured processing at any stage, and the original text openly expects some jars to spoil. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The method assumes spoilageThe instruction to "look at them from time to time to see whether any show signs of fermentation" is an admission that the pack is not shelf-stable. A preserving method whose maintenance step is re-scalding fermenting jars is not one to reproduce; use a current tested quince preserve or quince paste recipe instead.
- No seal, no processing"Cover" and "make sure the air is entirely excluded" describe a cold pack under a lid or wax, not a heat-processed vacuum seal. Nothing here sterilises the jars, drives off headspace air, or sets a boiling-water-bath time, so yeasts and moulds from the fruit surface and the kitchen air go into the jar alive.
- The rescue step has no temperature or timeStanding the jars in hot water with the covers loosened, "until the quinces are well scalded," gives neither a target temperature nor a duration, and re-covering a hot open jar by hand recontaminates it. Moulds that have already grown in a fermenting jar can leave heat-stable mycotoxins behind even when the visible growth is killed.
- The sugar ratio is not what it looks likeEqual weights of sugar and fruit sounds like a high-sugar, self-preserving pack, but the fruit here has been boiled and drained, so it carries a great deal of water that will dilute the syrup as the sugar draws out. Dry-layered sugar also dissolves unevenly, leaving pockets of weak syrup at the top of the jar where spoilage organisms take hold first.
- Why botulism is not the main worryQuinces are genuinely acidic, generally in the low-to-mid 3s on the pH scale, well below the 4.6 threshold, which is why this pack survives at all and why *Clostridium botulinum* is not the hazard. The hazards are yeast fermentation, surface mould and the alcohol and off-flavours that follow, none of which the recipe prevents.
- Vocabulary, for reading the pageA preserving-pan is a wide pan, often unlined copper or heavy brass though other materials were used; any wide non-reactive pot is its modern equivalent. The muslin bag of peels and cores is a pectin bag, cheesecloth today, and it is the one genuinely sound idea in the recipe, since quince cores and skins are particularly rich in pectin.
- Quinces themselvesRaw quince is hard, astringent and close to inedible; long cooking is what turns the flesh tender and shifts it from cream to amber or rose. Cut fruit browns quickly, and the fuzz the recipe has you wipe off is natural to the skin rather than dirt.
Oscar Tschirky's *Cook Book* (1896) came out of the Waldorf's kitchens at a moment when American households still put up fruit in quantity, and quince was a standard garden tree rather than a specialty item — too hard and too tart to eat out of hand, but so rich in pectin that it set almost by itself. That property gave the fruit its long career in preserving: the word marmalade is generally traced to the Portuguese *marmelo*, quince, and medieval and early modern "marmalades" were stiff quince pastes long before oranges took over the name. Sugar-layered cold packs of this kind are often said to have been a familiar recourse in nineteenth-century household books because they demanded no thermometer and no special jar, only sugar and vigilance, and the recipe's matter-of-fact plan for dealing with fermentation shows how much vigilance the method actually required of the cook.