More quince recipes

Back in 2008, I wrote about my new quince tree and its first harvest of five large quinces. The tree is now established and after several lean years, it has gone back to its former munificence, providing us with two large pickings of fruit which weigh at least 1lb each. A mature tree can produce nearly one hundred fruit.

It’s hard to know what to make with such quantities, so I have been scouring the modern and ancient recipe books to discover new ways of preserving the delicious flavour.

 (I’m not American, so I don’t finish any of my jams or jellies in a water bath. There’s no need. The sugar acts as a preservative. If you reduce the amount of sugar, then you may need to use a different method to ensure the jelly will keep safely.)

Quince Chips (from the receipt book of Lady Anne Blencowe interpreted by Christina Stapley)

Quinces

Golden castor sugar

Large ovenproof dish

Pan of boiling water

Place whole quinces into a saucepan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Boil for one minute then remove. Peel, core and slice the quinces thinly. Scatter them with golden castor sugar one at a time so they don’t become discoloured as they are exposed to the air. Lay the quince slices onto a large, ovenproof dish, turn them and scatter with sugar again. Place the dish over a pan of boiling water until the sugar has melted. Spoon all the melted sugar and the quince slices into the centre of the dish and heat until the sugar forms thick, white foam. Having made sure the quince slices are covered with syrup, set them one at a time at the edge of the dish to dry a little, before dipping them again. When the slices have taken up all the syrup, remove the dish from the heat and set the quince chips in a warm place to dry before packing in boxes.

 

Quince jelly

Quinces

Sugar

Spices (Ginger, 3-6 cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon) optional

Muslin and either somewhere to hang it from or a large frame

Small, sterilised jam jars and lids

Remove any brown sections from the quinces and chop into small pieces. If you are just making jelly, you don’t need to peel and core the fruit. If you want the flesh to make membrillo, then do this first. Place the chopped fruit in a large stainless steel pan.

Cover the fruit with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer on the lowest heat for up to five hours. Place the muslin over a separate basin or large saucepan, making sure you can retrieve the four corners of the muslin. Lift up the muslin and either attach to a frame or suspend from a hook (I use the handle of the extractor fan above the hob). Tie the ends of the muslin securely and leave to drip overnight.

The next morning, either compost the spent quince flesh or set it aside to make the membrillo.

Measure the amount of liquid and return it to a suitably large saucepan. Add either one pound of sugar per pint of liquid or 1kg of sugar per litre of liquid. Bring to a rolling boil stirring continuously for at least ten minutes then test for a setting point every five minutes. Quince jelly can be cantankerous. Don’t be surprised if it takes at least half an hour to reach a set. Don’t walk away in despair and leave it on a high heat. It will boil over. (Ask me how I know this!) Once a set is reached, pour the jelly into small, sterilised jam jars and seal the lids.

Quince cheese from ‘The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit’ by Biggs, McVicar and Flowerdew

2lbs quince

2 lbs sugar

1 small unwaxed orange

1 or 2 drops orange flower or rose petal water (optional)

Roughly chop the quinces into pieces. Finely chop the orange and simmer both together with just enough water to cover them until they are a pulp. Strain the pulp and add its own weight in sugar. Bring to the boil and cook gently for approximately 1 ½ hrs. Add the orange or rose water if desired. Then pot into warm, oiled pots, seal and store for three months or more before using. Turn the cheese out of the bowl and slice for serving with cooked meats or savoury dishes.

Two recipes from the New Edition of Mrs Beeton’s Every Day Cookery given to my great-aunt for Christmas in 1931

Quince Blancmange

1lb ripe quinces

6 ozs castor sugar

¾ oz gelatine

¼ pt double cream

1pt water

Peel and core the quinces, simmer them in the water until quite soft and broken but not reduced to a pulp. Strain through a jelly bag. Replace the liquor in the pan, add the sugar and the gelatine previously soaked in a little cold water. Stir and boil gently until the gelatine is dissolved. When cool, add the cream, mix well and turn into a mould, rinsed with cold water. Serves 4-5.

Quince Marmalade

To each lb of quince pulp allow ¾ lb loaf sugar or preserving sugar. If making apple and quince marmalade, use equal parts of quince and apple puree.

Pare the fruit then place in a preserving pan with as much water as will just cover the bottom of the pan and stew gently until reduced to a pulp. Pass through a sieve. Weigh the pulp, put it back into the cleaned pan, add the sugar and cook very gently until the marmalade sets quickly when tested on a cold plate. Place in sterilised jam jars, seal and date.

When I made this, I failed to read the instructions correctly (always a good start!). I simmered the quince for one and a half hours until it was well stewed but didn’t pass it through a sieve. I added a heaped pint measure of quince to the same amount of apple, then brought it to a rolling boil for ten minutes and didn’t turn the heat off during the five minutes it took to cool and set like concrete on a cold saucer. It was beginning to catch on the bottom of the pan but didn’t ruin the marmalade. It tastes great!

Quince Vodka

Quinces

Sugar

Spices (optional)

Vodka

Large clean glass jam jars with lids

Peel and core the quinces and chop or slice into small pieces suitable to fill the jam jar. Pour in some sugar depending how sweet you like your liqueur. Add spices. (I usually just add ginger and a few cloves so the flavour of the quince isn’t hidden.) Add vodka, removing any air bubbles and dissolving the sugar by podging with a chopstick. Seal, label and date. Keep in a cool dark place for three months or longer. This recipe can be made with layers of quince and pear or quince and apple.

Several family members and friends much prefer gin to vodka and several have diabetes so this year I have put up some Quince Gin without any sweetening.

Quince Gin

Peel, core and chop enough quinces to fill a large jam jar. Add chopped root ginger and a star anise plus 3-5 cloves. Fill the jar with gin, stirring well to remove air bubbles. Seal, label and date and leave in a cool, dark place until Christmas. Decant and serve.

Quince Ratafia (recipe provided by Jane Birkett)

1 large quince

1 large jam jar

Brown sugar

1/4tsp each cinnamon, ginger and mace

Vodka or brandy

Wash quince to remove fur. Grate quince without peeling or coring into a jar. Fill one third of the way up the jar with brown sugar. Add spices and spirit. Stir to remove air bubbles and dissolve sugar. Seal, label and date. Leave in a dark place for at least a month. 2-3 months is best.

 

 

October and nettle seeds

The south facing branch of the sycamore tree across the road from my suburban home has turned from green to yellow, showing autumn is finally here. The warm days of the past few weeks have brought both respite and a lengthening to the late growing season, but it is good to be reminded the wheel of the year is turning and change will follow soon.

September always fills me with panic. Have I grown enough? Has the harvest been enough? Have I foraged everything I need. Enough is such a strange concept. How many people do I need to treat? How many people will I need to feed over winter?

In previous years I could plan and estimate but these strange times make things more uncertain. Winter is coming and all I want to do is find my sheltered place, line my nest and hibernate for the duration. I know it won’t be possible but I can hope.

October is the time of roots and seeds, preferably gathered after the first frost, whenever that is. My ashwagandha plants are still vibrantly green. They were so late germinating and then growing back in July that they have hardly put out their flowers and the seed pods are still green. I will wait to see if any of them turn to orange in the next few weeks. Otherwise everything will be dug and dried or tinctured. There is no rush.

What I did find whilst I was pulling up the dead broad and climbing beans was a hidden last harvest of nettle seed. I remember finding some last seeds this time of year in local parks in the first year I gathered. I’d forgotten the time of gathering was quite so long.

Reading through foraging posts on social media, it seems everyone has finally discovered nettles make more than leaves for soup and fibre for fishing lines. The seeds carry a rich nutritive density. As with any medicinal plant, you do need to harvest and consume with caution.

The fresh seeds when eaten can send some people “high”. The American herbalist, Kiva Rose Hardin first pointed out that if you have a “dry” constitution then nettle seed will dry you out further. She lives in New Mexico, so she is very conscious of moisture and the lack of it. Another issue we have discovered is that if you have misused “recreational drugs” somewhere in your past, nettle seed will cause you difficulties.

We tincture fresh nettle seed  to support kidney failure, as first highlighted by David Winston. It is especially helpful in dealing with kidney pain when you haven’t drunk enough fluid. The dry seeds support exhausted adrenal glands. The usual dose is one teaspoonful taken in yoghurt or porridge or as a seed topping to salads.

We usually recommend they are consumed for at least three months or until the “patient” can’t stand the taste of them anymore. I have one friend with an incredibly stressful job who is still happily consuming her nettle seed two years after they were first given to her.

Dried nettle seeds can also be an aid to reducing dietary salt. They can be ground with salt crystals in a ratio of two: one to produce a useful condiment. If you want something a little hotter, add chilli flakes to the mix.

It worried me when nettle seeds at the farm were turning black and dropping off back in July, thinking I had not found enough for fresh seed tincture. The following month I found another stand of vibrant green, enough to put up nearly 5 litres of tincture. After our herb festival in September, huge nettle plants now covering all the Sanctuary like rampant triffids, dangled their seeds so seductively I was forced to pick them, even though I was there to harvest my damson tree and time, as always, was very short.

I did manage to pick my usual five pounds of damsons and these are now sitting on my jam shelves ready to eat. The quince harvest is very sparse but luckily my friend has a tree and shares her largesse with me. Two bottles of spiced quince gin and three of vodka are now infusing in the larder until Christmas and twenty small jars of quince jelly were made over two days this week.

Now, there are more nettle seeds from the garden drying in a paper bag over the kitchen radiator. I should have added another batch from underneath our hawthorn tree but I was too tired and now it is raining.

What I did pick was an orange flourish of calendula, waving from underneath the runner beans. I’ve lamented the lack of a dedicated calendula bed for the past two years, but collecting a few flowers here and there, self-seeded in the vegetable beds have given me a few to dry for anti-viral tea and enough to turn into oil for skin salves when next needed. There was even a rogue chamomile plant this year, providing enough to fill a tiny jar for emergency use in the future.

This gentle week at home has given me the time to decant this summer’s St John’s wort oil. Only two jars this years, but still plenty in the larder from previous summers. The dried vervain, yarrow and sage have also been poured into glass jars, labelled and put away. The vervain will be mixed with chamomile and lemon balm for IDGAS tea, yarrow for colds and conditions which require an anti-inflammatory and sage for mouth/tooth infections.

There are still bags of St Johns wort flowers, plantain leaves, red clover blossoms and other mysteries to emerge from the “hot cupboard” and put away but not today. I still have tomorrow. 

Quince – A Tale of Abundance

Many authors mention the ancient nature of the quince tree, Cydonia oblonga. They refer to biblical references about apples actually referring to quince, showing how the fruit of this small, deciduous tree has been valued for thousands of years.

I first came across quince when my friend, Jean, who was my child-minder for many years when Stephen and Kathryn were small, talked about making quince jelly for Christmas. My second experience was at a Herb Society AGM at Sulgrave Manor in 1998, when Jan Greenland produced a quince cheese. I was instantly hooked and the following year I planted a quince tree in the Sanctuary next to the main herb bed along with a meddler, an ancient pear.

Quince is related to both apples and pears. The five-petalled flower is pink tinged and as the year progresses, it turns into a small, green, lemon shaped fruit which eventually grows into a large yellow aromatic pear.

During my tree’s first year, the flowers dropped off and the leaves drooped. It wasn’t happy. Over the following years, it grew in size and always flowered, but produced no fruits.

This year was different. During one summer visit, I discovered a small fruit forming and was overjoyed. The next month, my father asked if I had seen my five quinces. This time I took pictures to record the momentous event.

At the end of October, one of the quinces had fallen off onto the floor, so we knew they were ripe to pick. The five quinces were reverently laid in a basket and more pictures taken. Then we brought them home and left them in the cool section of the fridge to wait until I could concentrate on turning them into jelly and cheese.

It would have been better if I had stored them in a cool, dark, dry place as they would have kept indefinitely. One of quinces was starting to go bad when I took them out of the fridge.

Surprisingly, Mrs Beeton doesn’t have any recipes for quince jelly, neither does the 1960s picture version of Good Housekeeping (my mother’s standard cookbook). I knew I’d seen recipes in my Good Housekeeping cookbook which I’ve had since before we were married, so even in the 1970s, people were using quinces.

I found another recipe on The Cottage Smallholder website which suggested cooking the quinces for many hours and using the juice for jelly and the flesh for cheese, which she referred to by its Italian name, membrillo. In the end, I used a combination of both recipes which yielded around 4lbs of cheese and 5lbs of jelly – not a bad quantity from 5 quinces!

Quince Jelly and Cheese

Wash the quinces. Chop into small pieces using a sharp, heavy knife as they’re very hard. I cored mine as I didn’t want the pips in the cheese, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to peel them either. Add the juice and grated peel of two large lemons. Cover them with cold water (I used 3 pints of water for 5 quinces). Bring to the boil and simmer on the lowest heat until the quince flesh is tender (between one and three hours). Strain.

You should use a jelly bag and strain overnight to ensure the jelly is cloudless. I didn’t have the appropriate equipment so I strained the juice into a plastic bowl and left it for a couple of hours so all the sediment fell to the bottom. Then I measured the juice and poured it back into the cleaned saucepan after I’d finished making the cheese, leaving the sediment in the bottom of the bowl.

Add 1lb granulated sugar to each pint of quince juice. Heat gently until the sugar is dissolved stirring with a wooden spoon continuously. Then heat to a rolling boil for ten minutes. Spoon several spoonfuls of jelly on to a pyrex saucer and place in the freezer to cool for 5 minutes. Keep doing this every five minutes until the jelly has a wrinkled skin over the top of it when you gently push it back with your finger nail. This is the setting point. Take the saucepan off the heat and pour jelly into sterilised glass jars heated in a low oven for ten minutes. Seal with jampot covers.

To make the cheese, place the quince flesh with a small amount of liquid in a liquidiser until you have a puree. Weigh the puree and return it to the saucepan with an equal weight of granulated sugar. (5 quinces produced 2 1/4lbs of puree and 2 ½ pints juice.) Cook on the lowest heat, stirring occasionally so it doesn’t stick or burn for another couple of hours. (I went away to start writing a new short story and returned for a stir every 15-20 minutes and it was fine.)

The cheese will turn a deep crimson and have the consistency of a thick soup you can stand a spoon up in. Apparently membrillo is cut into slices, so to achieve that consistency you need to cook it for at least three to five hours. I only cooked mine for two. You don’t need to cook at a rolling boil because you aren’t looking for a setting point. When the cheese is thick enough for your liking, pour into sterilised glass jars and cover in the usual way.

The cheese has a slightly gritty texture because of the stone cells which are also found in pears. It tastes aromatic and unique and very moreish! I’m looking forward to trying it with feta or other salty Greek cheeses. The jelly tastes very much like an aromatic pear and will be wonderful as an accompaniment to meat, cheese or just spread on toast.

Apparently the energetic properties of quince are linked to purification, protection and exorcism, but I prefer to look to the energies associated with apple – abundance. Quince is a veritable cornucopia and I am so pleased the tree has finally gifted me with its fruit.