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Preserved Quinces (Pare quarter and core)
Pare, quarter and core the quinces and throw into cold water as prepared. Put the cores (without the ends) and parings into a preserving kettle with two quarts of water to each quart of parings, cook slowly for half an hour and strain. Return the strained liquid to the kettle, and drop in as many pieces of the fruit as possible without crowding. Simmer gently until tender enough to pierce with a straw. Remove and add more fruit, until all is cooked. When all are done measure the liquid that remains; for ten pounds of the fruit, there should be two quarts of liquid; if less, add hot water to make up the amount. Add nine pounds of granulated sugar and cook slowly to a syrup, skimming often. Then drop in the pieces of quinces, a few at a time, and simmer until transparent. Drop them in the jars as cooked, and when all are done, bring the syrup to a boil, fill up the jars and seal.
A classic two-stage preserve: an infusion made from the peels and cores supplies the pectin and flavour, then the fruit is candied in it. Nothing here is difficult, but the order matters and the quantities are large by modern standards.
- The hinge: don't skip the paring liquidQuince skins and cores hold most of the fruit's pectin and much of its perfume, which is why the trimmings are simmered and strained before anything else happens. Cooking the fruit in plain sugar syrup instead gives a thin, dull result.
- Scale it downTen pounds of fruit and nine of sugar is a full day's work and makes a very large quantity of preserve. Quartering the recipe (2 1/2 lb fruit, 2 1/4 lb sugar, about 1 pint of paring liquid) behaves identically.
- Preparing the fruitRub off the grey fuzz, and expect the flesh to be hard and to resist the peeler. Cut surfaces oxidise fast, hence the bowl of cold water; a squeeze of lemon in it does no harm.
- The straw testA broom straw was the period's toothpick. Tender enough to pierce means just yielding, not collapsing, since the pieces get a second cooking in the syrup and will fall apart if overdone in the first.
- ColourRaw quince is pale cream and turns pink to deep garnet as it cooks, a change that depends on long, gentle cooking. Rushing the syrup stage at a hard boil tends to leave the fruit paler and risks scorched sugar.
- Use a non-reactive panA period preserving kettle was often unlined copper or brass. Quince is acidic; use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron, and choose something wide so the fruit can lie in a single uncrowded layer.
- SealingFilling hot jars and sealing them was standard practice when this was written. Current guidance is to leave 1/4 inch headspace and process filled jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, which costs nothing and prevents surface mould.
- ServingVery sweet and firm. Preserves of this kind were generally eaten in small amounts with cold meat, game and cheese, or on bread rather than by the spoonful.
Quince was once a kitchen-garden staple in Britain and North America precisely because of the qualities that later pushed it out: too hard and astringent to eat raw, but so rich in pectin and acid that it sets reliably without added help. The word marmalade comes through Portuguese marmelo, quince, and originally meant a stiff quince paste rather than anything citrus. Recipes like this one, from a household compendium published around the turn of the twentieth century, represent the tail end of the fruit's domestic reign in America; over the following decades fireblight in orchards, cheap citrus, and commercially bottled pectin made the long paring-and-simmering routine look like a great deal of trouble, and quince retreated to a few specialist growers and the preserving traditions of the Mediterranean and Latin America, where membrillo and dulce de membrillo kept it in daily use.