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Quince Cake
(Cotognata) The ingredients are about six pounds of quinces and four pounds of granulated sugar. Put on the fire the apples covered with water, and when they begin to crack remove them, skin and scrape to put together all the pulp. Rub the latter through a sieve. Put back the pulp on the fire with the sugar and stir continually in order that it may not attack to the bottom of the kettle.
It will be enough to boil for seven or eight minutes and remove when it begins to form pieces when lifted with the ladle.
Now in order to prepare the quince-cake spread it on a board to the thickness of about a silver dollar and dry it in the sun covered with cheese cloth to keep away the flies. When it is dry cut it in the form of chocolate tablets and remove each piece from the board passing the blade of a knife underneath.
If it is wished to make it crisp, melt about three and a half pounds of granulated sugar with two tablespoonfuls of water and when the sugar has boiled enough to "make the thread" smear every one of the little quince cakes with it. If the sugar becomes too hard during the operation put it back on the fire with a little water and make it boil again. When the sugar is dry on one side and on the edge, smear the other side.
This is quince paste — cotognata — the Italian cousin of Spanish membrillo, with an optional hard-sugar glaze. The translation is rough in places and the timings assume an open kettle and a hot Mediterranean afternoon.
- "The apples" are the quincesThe Italian for quince is mela cotogna, literally quince apple, and the translator has slipped into calling them apples midway through. There are no apples in this recipe.
- "Attack the bottom"Another translation artifact: the pulp must not attach to the bottom of the pan. Use the heaviest pan you have and a flat-edged wooden spoon or spatula, since scorched quince paste tastes of it throughout.
- Seven or eight minutes is optimisticGo by the sign given rather than the clock: the paste is done when it holds its shape and falls from the ladle in cohesive lumps rather than a stream. With six pounds of fruit in a domestic pan this commonly takes 30 to 60 minutes of steady stirring. It spits as it thickens, so a long sleeve and a splatter screen are worth having.
- Don't discard the cooking liquid or peelsQuince is exceptionally high in pectin, most of it concentrated in the skins and cores. Reserving a little of the water the fruit cracked open in lets you loosen the pulp if it stiffens too fast without diluting the set.
- Thickness of a silver dollarA shade under 1/8 inch, about 2.5 mm. Spread it on parchment or a lightly oiled marble slab rather than bare wood, which will glue itself to the paste.
- Sun-drying, and what to do insteadSun-drying needs several days of dry, warm, moving air; damp or cool weather will let it sour or mould before it sets. A dehydrator or an oven held at 130-150F with the door ajar does the same job in 8 to 24 hours, or simply pour the paste into a shallow lined pan and let it firm in the refrigerator for a stiffer, softer-textured version.
- "Make the thread"The thread stage of sugar, about 230-235F on a candy thermometer, when a lifted spoonful trails a fine filament. Boiled well beyond that it sets hard and brittle instead of coating. The remedy given in the text is sound: add a splash of water and reboil to bring it back.
- YieldThis is a large batch, running to several dozen of the small tablet-shaped pieces. Stored in a tin between layers of parchment in a cool dry place it keeps for months; the sugar content is its preservative.
Quince paste is one of the oldest surviving forms of preserved fruit in Europe, and its name is buried in an English word: the Portuguese marmelo, quince, gave us marmalade, which originally meant a stiff quince conserve cut in slabs rather than anything spreadable or citrus. The technique — cook the fruit, sieve it, boil it with sugar until it sets on its own pectin, then dry it into cuttable sheets — travelled through the Arab-influenced kitchens of Sicily and Spain and remains alive as Sicilian cotognata, Spanish membrillo and Portuguese marmelada. That it appears in the Pastry and Sweets chapter of a 1919 American-published Italian cookbook rather than among the preserves is telling: cut into tablets and glazed with boiled sugar, as here, it was eaten as confectionery, the sort of thing a household made once a year when quinces came in and then ate slowly through the winter. Quince is almost inedible raw and full of pectin, which makes it the natural fruit for this treatment; the sun-drying step in the original marks the recipe as pre-dehydrator and southern in origin.