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Quince Pie
(Spain.) Line a plate with paste, bake it brown, fill it with a layer of quince marmalade, then whipped cream, flavored with sugar and wine, and decorated with preserved cherries, angelica, or citron. Serve cold.
A no-bake assembly on a fully blind-baked shell, so nearly everything depends on the pastry being crisp and the filling being firm.
- "Line a plate with paste"The plate is a pie plate or tin, and the paste is a plain short pastry. Blind-bake it completely, with weights, then a few minutes uncovered until evenly brown, because it never goes back into the oven. The original gives no temperature or time.
- Quince marmaladeMost likely the thick Spanish dulce de membrillo (quince paste), or else a stiff quince conserve, rather than a loose citrus-style marmalade. Membrillo sold in blocks is too firm to spread; warm it with a spoonful or two of water until it will just level out, then let it cool and set in the shell.
- The wine in the creamA sweet sherry, Madeira or Malaga suits the Spanish attribution. Add no more than a tablespoon or two per cup of cream, and add it with the sugar before the cream thickens — pouring liquid into cream that is already whipped will slacken it and it will weep onto the marmalade.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once standard for green decoration, is now a specialty item. Candied citron, candied orange peel or a few strips of glacé fruit do the same job; the cherries should be the firm glacé kind, drained and blotted.
- Assemble lateMarmalade against warm or freshly baked pastry, and cream on top of that, will soften the crust within an hour. Fill and decorate no more than an hour before serving and keep it cold.
- YieldIf the plate is a 9-inch one, it will serve six to eight; the original gives no size or quantities. Figure on about a cup of quince paste for the layer and a cup of cream, whipped, to cover it.
Quince is one of the oldest preserving fruits in the Iberian kitchen — too hard and astringent to eat raw, but so high in pectin that it sets into a sliceable block, which is exactly what dulce de membrillo is. The English word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelo, quince, and originally meant this kind of solid quince paste rather than anything made with oranges. Adelaide Keen's book collects dishes gathered country by country, and the "(Spain.)" tag here is doing the work of a whole recipe: the assumption is that the reader can buy or make quince paste and simply needs to be told the Spanish way of presenting it, on a crisp baked shell under sweetened cream. The candied cherries, angelica and citron are the standard decorative trio of turn-of-the-century pastry work, used as much for colour as for flavour.