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Quince and Apple Preserves
Take equal weights of quinces and sugar, pare, core, leave whole or cut up, as preferred, boil till tender in water enough to cover, cut up, as preferred, boil till tender in water enough to cover, carefully take out and put on a platter, add sugar to the water, 1
The text breaks off mid-sentence, and the apples of the title never actually appear in what survives — you are looking at the quince half of the method, with a duplicated line where the type was set twice. What remains is still a workable outline of a nineteenth-century weight-for-weight preserve.
- Equal weights, not volumes"Equal weights of quinces and sugar" matches the fruit pound for pound with sugar; the text does not say whether the fruit is weighed before or after paring and coring, nor what kind of sugar is meant. This is a high sugar ratio by modern standards and is what gives the preserve its keeping quality.
- The missing applesThe title promises apples; the surviving text stops before they are added. The book gives no ratio and no method for them, so any proportion is your own decision.
- Don't discard the parings and coresQuince peel and seeds are rich in pectin and carry much of the fruit's perfume. Tie them in muslin and simmer them in the covering water while the fruit cooks, then lift the bag out before the sugar goes in.
- "Boil till tender"Raw quince is hard as a turnip. Whole fruit will need 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering; quartered pieces 20 to 30 minutes. Test with a skewer — the flesh should yield without collapsing, since it has a second cooking ahead of it in the syrup.
- ColourLong cooking turns quince from pale cream to amber and, given enough time, to rose or garnet. The change is not a sign of scorching, but the deeper shades generally take several hours of simmering rather than one.
- Knowing when the syrup is doneThe book gives no test. Setting point for a preserve like this is 220F on a thermometer, or the moment a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer. Undercooked syrup will weep in the jar.
- YieldTwo pounds of prepared fruit with two pounds of sugar gives roughly four to six half-pint jars, depending on how much syrup is boiled away.
- StorageThe original stops before any sealing instruction. Cool and refrigerate, and use within a few weeks; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath canning schedule rather than improvising from a nineteenth-century text.
The quince was once a staple of American preserving precisely because it is rarely eaten raw: hard, astringent and so full of pectin that it sets almost anything it is cooked with. Household books of the 1880s and 1890s, The Dixie Cook Book among them, carried recipes for quince preserves, and the pairing with apple here is a thrifty one — a few strongly scented quinces would perfume a much larger batch. The word marmalade itself descends from marmelo, the Portuguese for quince, a reminder of how central the fruit once was to European preserving before oranges took over the name. Quince trees stood in a great many American dooryards through the nineteenth century and then largely disappeared from them in the twentieth, which is why a recipe that assumed every reader had a bushel to hand now reads like an instruction from a lost kitchen.