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Preserve of Quince
(Conserva di cotogne soda) The ingredients are quinces, peeled and with the core removed, and granulated sugar, in the proportion of eight tenths of quinces to five tenths of sugar, or a little more than one and a half quinces for one part of sugar.
Dissolve the sugar on the fire with half a glass of water, boil a little, then remove from the fire and put aside.
Cut the quinces-peeled and coreless-in very thin slices and put them on the fire with a glass of water, supposing the quantity to be about two pounds. Keep covered, but stir once in a while with the ladle, trying to break the slices and reduce them to a paste. When the quinces are made tender through cooking, pour in the thick syrup of sugar already prepared, mix and stir and let the mixture boil with the cover removed until the preserve is ready, which will be known when it begins to fall like shreds when taken up with the ladle.
Let it cool and put in well covered jars.
A quince paste in the Italian style, thick enough to slab out of the ladle in shreds. The proportions are given by weight and the whole thing hinges on cooking the fruit soft in water before the sugar goes in.
- The ratio, in plain numbersEight parts fruit to five parts sugar by weight: for 2 lb of peeled, cored quince use about 1 lb 4 oz sugar. The "one and a half quinces to one part of sugar" phrasing is the same figure expressed loosely and can be ignored.
- A glass of waterIn Italian books of this period a bicchiere is roughly 200–250 ml, so call it a cup. Half a glass for the sugar syrup is a scant half cup — just enough to dissolve it.
- Soften first, sweeten secondSugar added to raw quince slices tends to firm the pieces and makes them much slower to break down. Simmer the fruit covered in water until it collapses under the ladle, then add the syrup. This is the instruction that decides whether you get paste or candied chunks.
- Keep the peels and coresQuince skin and pips are pectin-rich, though the recipe discards them. Tie them in muslin and simmer them with the fruit, then lift the bag out before the sugar goes in; the set should be firmer for it.
- Knowing when it is done"Falls like shreds from the ladle" is the same test as sheeting off a spoon, around 220–222°F on a thermometer. For a paste stiff enough to slice, cook past that until a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a clean track on the bottom.
- It will change colourRaw quince flesh is pale and grainy; long cooking with sugar turns it amber, then deep rose. The colour shift is normal and is a fair indicator that the preserve is well along.
- Stir attentively at the endOnce thick, the paste catches and scorches very easily. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat moderate and stir the bottom constantly through the last stretch. A splatter guard helps, since it spits.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of prepared fruit should give in the region of 2 lb of preserve, three to four half-pint jars. "Well covered jars" was not a sterile seal -- store it in the refrigerator, or follow current water-bath canning directions if you want it shelf stable.
Quince — mela cotogna, from the Latin cotoneum — is, in most cultivars, too hard and astringent to eat raw, and for most of its history it was grown precisely to be cooked with sugar or honey. Its very high pectin content made it the standard fruit for stiff, sliceable pastes across the Mediterranean: Spanish membrillo, Portuguese marmelada, French cotignac. The English word marmalade is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelo, meaning quince, and only later attached itself to citrus. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (published in New York in 1919, and often said to draw on Pellegrino Artusi's household manual) belongs to the world of domestic sugar-work: things put up in the autumn when the fruit came in, to be brought out through the winter with cheese or at the end of a meal. The soda in the Italian title means firm — distinguishing it from the looser quince jelly made from the strained cooking liquid.