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Quince Honey (Peel and grate three)
Peel and grate three medium-sized quinces and cook in three cupfuls of water till tender; then add three pounds of sugar. Boil fifteen minutes, then bottle. Nice for pancakes or fritters.
A thin quince syrup rather than a jelly o honey is involved ame comple. The whole thing takes about half an hour once the fruit is grated.
- Buying quincesLook for hard, yellow, intensely fragrant fruit in autumn; they never soften on the counter the way a pear does. Three medium quinces is somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 lb before peeling and coring, depending on size.
- GratingRaw quince is dense and awkward on a box grater. The coarse shredding disc of a food processor does it in seconds, and the finer the shred, the faster the fruit breaks down in the water.
- Core it tooThe recipe says peel and grate but assumes you know to discard the core. The seeds and gritty core are inedible, though tying the peels and cores in a scrap of muslin and simmering them with the fruit adds pectin and colour retrieve the bag before the sugar goes in.
- Cooking the fruit"Till tender" is roughly 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering; test by crushing a shred. Grated quince may begin to turn from cream toward pink or amber, but the deep colour takes far longer cooking than this, so judge by tenderness.
- The sugar ratioThree pounds is about 6 3/4 cups of granulated sugar to roughly a pound of fruit very high even by preserve standards. It makes the syrup keep, and it makes the finished product sweet enough that a spoonful goes a long way.
- Fifteen minutes is a syrup, not a setThat boil takes the mixture to a pourable consistency, which is what you want for pancakes. If you would rather have something spreadable, boil until a candy thermometer reads 220F, but expect a much smaller yield.
- Bottling"Then bottle" meant pouring boiling-hot into scalded jars and sealing. Sugar this concentrated resists spoilage well, but for storage outside the refrigerator follow a current water-bath canning procedure with proper headspace and processing time; otherwise refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
Quince was a fixture of the American preserving pantry long before it became a specialty-market curiosity. The fruit is high in pectin and acid but almost inedible raw, so nearly every historical use runs through sugar and long cooking marmalades, cheeses, jellies and syrups like this one. The name "honey" here is often said to be doing what it does in several period recipes: signalling a clear, pourable, amber sweet meant to be poured over something rather than spread, in the same family as the apple and pear "honeys" that appear in preserve chapters of the same era. Its place in such a book is practical. Quinces ripened late and had to be dealt with in a batch, and a household with a griddle going most mornings had constant use for a jar of sweet syrup once the summer fruit had run out.