Home › Preserves › Quince Marmalade
Quince Marmalade
Pare, quarter and core quinces, cut in little squares, measure and allow an equal amount of sugar; place the fruit in a porcelain kettle with just water enough to cover, boil till tender, and skim out carefully; make a syrup of the sugar and the water in which the quinces were boiled, let come to boiling point, skim well, and drop the quinces gently in; boil fifteen minutes and dip out carefully into jelly-bowls or molds. The syrup forms a jelly around the fruit so that it can be turned out on a dish, and is very palatable as well as ornamental. In this way quinces too defective for preserves may be used. -Mrs. Mary A. Cooper.
A two-stage preserve: the fruit is poached first, then finished in a syrup built from its own cooking liquid, so the quince keeps its shape and the pectin it releases sets the syrup around it. A few points on equipment, quantities and keeping.
- The hinge: don't boil the fruit twice into mushThe recipe says only to boil the quinces till tender before lifting them out and giving them fifteen minutes more in the syrup. Stopping while they still offer slight resistance to a knife point is the safer reading: fruit already soft when it goes into the sugar will collapse, and you get a purée rather than the cubes suspended in jelly the recipe is after.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or porcelain-lined pan, not china. The point is a non-reactive surface: bare iron or aluminium will dull the fruit's colour and can pick up a metallic taste from the acid, though copper preserving pans were themselves in common use for fruit. Stainless steel is the modern equivalent.
- Measuring "an equal amount of sugar"The recipe does not say whether the measure is by volume or by weight; nineteenth-century American books generally measured by volume, in which case a quart of cut fruit takes a quart of sugar, roughly 1 lb 12 oz. Weighing fruit and sugar equally gives a slightly sweeter, firmer set and is closer to modern preserving practice.
- Where the set comes fromQuince is one of the highest-pectin fruits there is, and most of it sits in the cores and peel. Tie the parings and cores in muslin and poach them alongside the cubes, then squeeze and discard the bag before making the syrup. Nothing else is needed to make this jell.
- ColourRaw quince is pale, and cooked quince turns anywhere from amber to deep rose depending on how long it is heated. The fifteen-minute finish in syrup is unlikely to take it much past golden. If you want the ruby colour associated with quince paste, that takes long slow cooking, which is not what this recipe is doing.
- Defective fruitMrs. Cooper's point about fruit "too defective for preserves" means bruised or misshapen quinces that will not look handsome whole or in halves. Cut away any brown or soft patch generously; the gritty stone cells near the core should also go.
- KeepingTurned out into bowls or moulds, this is a fresh preserve, not a canned one. There is no sealing step, so refrigerate it and eat within two or three weeks. To store it at room temperature you would need current water-bath canning instructions and proper jars.
- Yield and servingServing — It unmoulds cleanly onto a plate and is served in slices with cold roast meats, game or a firm cheese as much as with bread.
Quinces were a fixture of American kitchen gardens and farm orchards through the nineteenth century in a way they are not now: too hard and astringent to eat raw, but so rich in pectin and perfume that they were the default fruit for jellies, marmalades and "cheeses." The word marmalade itself comes from Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo, quince — the original marmalade was a stiff quince paste, and the transfer of the name to citrus is a later English development. What Mrs. Cooper describes is closer to the older sense than a modern orange marmalade is: fruit set in its own jelly, firm enough to turn out of a mould and slice. The Dixie Cook-Book credits her by name, and the practical note at the end — that this is a way to use quinces too blemished to preserve whole — is exactly the kind of thrift such collections were assembled to circulate.