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Preserves (Replace fruit and boil slowly)
replace fruit and boil slowly till clear, place in jars and pour syrup over them. To increase the quantity without adding sugar, take half or two-thirds in weight as many fair sweet apples as there are quinces, pare, quarter, and core; after removing quinces, put apples into the syrup, and boil until they begin to look red and clear, and are tender; place quinces and apples in jar in alternate layers, and cover with syrup. For the use of parings and cores, see "Quince Jelly." Apples alone may be preserved in the same way.
This is the tail end of a quince preserve, printed as a continuation — the earlier lines would have covered boiling the pared, quartered quinces until tender, lifting them out, and making a syrup from the cooking liquid and an equal weight of sugar. Read it with that assumption and it works.
- The missing first halfQuinces are peeled, quartered and cored, then simmered in water until a fork goes in easily, which for a firm quince can take 30 to 45 minutes. The cooking water plus sugar (traditionally pound for pound with the fruit) becomes the syrup that the fruit is then "replaced" into.
- "Boil slowly till clear"This is the real instruction. Quince flesh is opaque and pale when raw and turns translucent, then rosy amber, as it cooks in syrup — that colour change, not a clock, tells you the preserve is done. Expect anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour at a bare simmer; a hard boil breaks the quarters apart.
- Proportions by weight, not volumeThe apple extension is given as half to two-thirds the weight of the quinces. Weigh the prepared fruit after paring and coring, and use a scale rather than cups; the whole method assumes weight-for-weight sugar work.
- Choosing the apples"Fair sweet apples" means sound, unblemished, and not sharply tart — the syrup is already carrying the quince acidity. A firm cooking apple that holds its shape is essential; a modern soft eating apple will collapse into the syrup before it clears.
- The apples cook fasterThe original has you add the apples only after the quinces have been lifted out; apples need far less time in the syrup than quince, so watch them and take them out as soon as they are tender and beginning to blush.
- Parings and coresThe cross-reference sends the trimmings to another use rather than the scrap heap. Quince skins and cores are rich in pectin, which is why they make a good jelly on their own.
- Filling and keeping the jarsPack the fruit hot, cover with boiling syrup, and follow current canning practice for a boiling-water bath if the jars are to be shelf-stored; the book was written for cellars, wax seals and rapid use. Refrigerating the filled jars is the simpler course for a small batch.
- YieldA batch on this scale, say 3 lb of quinces with 2 lb of apples and their sugar, will fill several pint jars; the exact count depends on how tightly the layers are packed.
Quinces were a fixture of American kitchen gardens well into the nineteenth century precisely because they are so rarely worth eating raw and need long long cooking, which made them a preserving fruit rather than a dessert fruit. Their high pectin and acid content also made them one household source of set for other preserves, alongside apples and apple parings, which is why this recipe sends the parings and cores off to a separate jelly rather than the compost. The trick of stretching an expensive fruit with a cheap one, "to increase the quantity without adding sugar," reflects the economics of the period as much as the taste: sugar was the costly line item in any preserve, and apples cooked in quince syrup take on much of the colour and perfume of the quince. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same editorial stable as the widely reprinted Buckeye books, is full of this sort of chained instruction, where one recipe assumes you have just read the one above it.