Baked Quinces
Wash and core ripe quinces, fill with sugar, and bake in bakingdish with a little water.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know quinces, which most cooks no longer do. The important thing it leaves out is time: raw quince is hard, astringent and inedible, and it needs long, slow, moist heat to turn tender and rose-coloured.
- Oven and timeThe recipe names neither. Reckon on 325-350F for 1.5 to 2 hours, until a knife slides in with no resistance. Quince flesh is grittier and denser than apple and will still be firm at the point where a baked apple would be done.
- CoringThe core is woody and the flesh is dense enough to turn a knife. Halve them first if the fruit resists, or use an apple corer with a mallet-free grip and steady pressure; a melon baller cleans out the seed cavity well.
- "Ripe" quincesRipe here means fully yellow and strongly perfumed, not soft. A quince that yields to the thumb is past it. They ripen off the tree and will scent a room for weeks.
- Sugar quantityReckon on 1 to 2 tablespoons per fruit packed into the cavity, plus more if your quinces are especially sour. Quince is far more tart and astringent than apple and takes sugar accordingly.
- The water"A little water" means about a quarter inch in the dish, topped up if it cooks dry. It thickens to a thin syrup, often tinged pink as the fruit cooks; spoon it over before serving.
- The colour changeLong cooking often turns quince flesh from cream to pink or deep amber, though how far it goes depends on the fruit and on how long and how closely covered it cooks. Test for tenderness rather than relying on colour.
- YieldOne quince per person is generous. Serve warm with cream, or cold, where the pectin will have set the syrup to a light jelly.
Quince was a standard fruit in nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens, valued less for eating out of hand than for its pectin and perfume: it stiffened apple jelly, scented preserves, and made marmalade in the older sense of the word (the term is generally traced through Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo, quince). The Dixie Cook Book gives quince its own cluster of entries in the fruit section because a household with a quince tree faced a short, heavy glut every autumn and needed several ways to use it. Baking whole with sugar is the plainest of them, and the recipe's brevity may suggest an assumption that has since lapsed: that a cook would already know a quince takes hours, not minutes.