No. 3685

Preserved Quinces

Coings Confits

Quarter some good, sound quinces; peel, core and throw them at once into cold water, then plunge them into boiling water and boil until they become quite tender. Refresh, drain and range them in wide, shallow vessels; cover with boiling syrup at fifteen degrees and keep them in a cool place for twenty to twenty-four hours; drain off the syrup, add a little sugar, boil up and let it attain two degrees more; continue the same process until it reaches thirty degrees; then drain the syrup again, add a little more sugar and boil until it reaches thirty-two degrees, then put in the fruits and boil up once. Pour into stone jars and when cold close hermetically.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's degrees are Baumé, read off a syrup hydrometer, and the whole method is a slow sugar ladder rather than a boil-and-fill jam. Nothing here is difficult, but the schedule runs several days.

What the degrees meanDegrees Baume measure syrup density. Roughly: 15°B is about 28 percent sugar by weight (around 400 g sugar dissolved in a litre of water), 30°B about 56 percent, and 32°B about 59 percent, i.e. about 59 Brix. A cheap syrup hydrometer or a refractometer reads this directly; take the reading on cooled syrup, since heat thins it.
Why the syrup climbs by stagesDropping tender quince straight into heavy syrup pulls water out faster than sugar goes in, and the fruit shrivels and turns hard. Raising the density two degrees a day lets the sugar exchange gradually, so the quarters stay plump and translucent. This is the hinge of the recipe; skipping steps ruins the texture.
Allow a weekAllow a week or more -- Each rest is twenty to twenty-four hours, and the syrup goes from 15° to 32° in two-degree steps, so expect something like eight or nine days from first boil to sealing. The active work each day is short: draining, adding sugar, and boiling the syrup up.
Cook the fruit fully firstQuince flesh is stony and will not soften once sugar is in the pan. Boil the quarters in plain water until a skewer goes through with no resistance before the syrup ever touches them.
OxidationCut quince browns within a minute. "Throw them at once into cold water" is the point of the instruction; a squeeze of lemon in the water helps. "Refresh" simply means plunging the cooked fruit into cold water to stop the cooking.
Keep the peels and coresThey hold much of the pectin and a good deal of the perfume. Simmered in water and strained, they give a quince jelly worth making alongside, and the strained liquid can replace plain water in the first syrup.
ColourLong, gentle contact with sugar and heat can take quince from pale yellow to amber and sometimes to a deep rose. That change is generally attributed to the fruit's tannins reacting, not to scorching.
Storage"Close hermetically" meant sealing the jar mouth against air, not modern canning. A syrup at 32°B is about 59 Brix, below the roughly 65 Brix usually reckoned enough to hold a preserve unaided, so pack into sterilised jars and keep them cold and dark, or follow a current water-bath procedure if you want shelf storage. Surface mould on an under-strength syrup is the usual failure.
YieldThree pounds of quinces, about four large fruit, fill roughly two pint jars with fruit and syrup.

A Little History

Quince was the original preserving fruit of Europe: it is hard, sour and inedible raw, but loaded with pectin and aroma, and it takes sugar better than almost anything else. The Portuguese marmelo, quince, gave English its word marmalade, which for centuries meant a stiff quince paste rather than anything to do with oranges. Coings confits belongs to the French tradition of candied fruit, associated above all with Apt in Provence, where whole fruit is walked up through progressively heavier syrups over days. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional reference, and its preserving chapter assumes a kitchen with a saccharometer and a pastry cook with time on his hands. It is often suggested that by the time the book appeared quince was already slipping out of American home kitchens as softer dessert fruits and commercial jams took over, though the timing is uncertain; that may be part of why the recipe reads as a confectioner's exercise rather than a household one.