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Quince Jam
Peel and cut in one-inch-square pieces twenty-five pounds sound, fresh, ripe quinces and prepare in same manner as apricot jam.
A cross-reference recipe of the kind common in professional cookbooks: the author assumes you have already read the apricot jam entry, which supplies the sugar and the method. Quinces, however, behave nothing like apricots, and that is where the work lies.
- The hinge: soften the fruit before the sugar goes inQuince flesh is hard, dry and full of stone cells, and sugar sets it permanently. Simmer the diced fruit in water until a piece crushes easily against the pan, then add sugar and boil to setting point. Sugar added to raw quince gives gritty, half-cooked cubes no amount of further boiling will rescue.
- Scale it downTwenty-five pounds of peeled quince is a hotel or market-stall batch and needs a preserving pan far larger than any domestic pot. Three to four pounds of prepared fruit is a sane household batch; deep pans of jam scorch and never reach a set.
- Sugar quantityThe recipe gives none, since it points to the apricot entry. Preserving recipes of the era commonly use somewhere between three-quarters of a pound and a full pound of sugar per pound of prepared fruit. Quince is high in pectin and acid, so it should set on the lower figure.
- Do not discard the peel and coresThe skin, core and pips are especially rich in pectin, though the flesh carries plenty of its own. Tie them in muslin and simmer them with the fruit, then lift the bag out before potting.
- Setting pointBoil to 220F (104C), or until a spoonful wrinkles when pushed on a chilled saucer. Quince goes from loose to solid quickly at the end, so start testing early.
- The colour will changeRaw quince flesh is pale cream; long cooking turns it amber, then deep rose or garnet. This is normal and is one mark of a well-made quince preserve, not a sign of burning.
- "Sound, fresh, ripe"Ripe quinces are yellow all over and strongly fragrant; a green-shouldered fruit is astringent and will not soften evenly. Cut away the brown bruised patches that quinces bruise into so readily, as they carry an off, tannic flavour.
- Potting and keepingFollow current home-preserving guidance for jars and water-bath processing times rather than the sealing and storage practice implied here.
Quince (Cydonia oblonga) was a preserving fruit long before it was anything else: too hard, dry and astringent to eat raw, but so rich in pectin and acid that it sets almost by itself. The Portuguese word for it, marmelo, gave English marmalade, which originally meant a stiff quince paste rather than anything made of oranges. In a professional cookbook of this period the preserves chapter is written in exactly this compressed way — one full method for a representative fruit, then a string of one-line variations telling the cook which fruit to substitute and how to cut it — because it was addressed to someone who had already made a hundred pots of apricot jam and only needed to know the size of the dice and the weight of fruit that filled the pan.