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Baked Quinces
One dozen nice quinces, cored and well rubbed. Put in baking pans, and fill the centre with pulverized sugar. Bake and serve cold, with or without cream.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know quinces. The fruit is rock-hard and inedible raw, so everything depends on baking it long enough at a low enough heat to turn the flesh soft and rose-coloured.
- RubbingQuinces come covered in a grey fuzz. "Well rubbed" means scrubbing that down with a cloth or towel until the skin is smooth and yellow; it is not a euphemism for peeling.
- CoringUse an apple corer or a narrow knife and take out the core and seeds from the stem end without cutting through the base, so the cavity holds sugar. Quince seeds contain amygdalin and are bitter; discard them.
- Sugar"Pulverized sugar" in this period is finely ground white sugar, closest to modern superfine or caster sugar. Confectioners' sugar with cornstarch is not the same thing. Allow roughly a tablespoon per fruit, more if the quinces are very sour.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives neither temperature nor time. A slow oven, roughly 300-325F, and 1.5 to 2.5 hours depending on size is a reasonable modern reading; they are done when a skewer slides in with no resistance, though the deepening from white to pink or amber can take longer than the softening.
- LiquidThe recipe gives none, and quinces are drier than apples. Pour a quarter inch of water into the pan and cover with foil for most of the baking, uncovering at the end, or the fruit will scorch before it softens.
- YieldOne dozen serves twelve as written, one fruit each. The recipe halves and quarters without adjustment.
- Serving"Serve cold, with or without cream" most likely means pouring cream rather than whipped. The syrup left in the pan is worth spooning over.
Quinces were a fixture of North American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century and largely disappeared from them in the twentieth, which is why a book like The Home Cook Book (compiled by ladies of Toronto and first published in the 1870s) can assume its readers had a dozen on hand in autumn and needed no more instruction than this. The fruit's high pectin made it the standard base for jellies and marmalades before commercial pectin was available; the word marmalade itself is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelo, quince. Baking whole was the simplest use, exploiting the long slow heat that converts the fruit's pale, astringent flesh to the pink colour and perfume that make it worth the trouble. The chapter heading here, "Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen," belongs to the compiled-community-cookbook tradition, where recipes were gathered under discursive headings and credited to the contributor as much as the dish.