What on earth is Quince?

I doubt anyone under the age of 130 could even tell you what one looked like.

No fruit or vegetable can have fallen out of fashion as dramatically as the quince – which harks back to a time of walled gardens, madrigals, haunches of venison and small beer, but is quite invisible in the modern kitchen. I doubt anyone under the age of 130 could even tell you what one looked like.

Well, it’s a hard cousin of the pear and the apple, very hard.  It has a lumpy, canary yellow skin once ripe, and looks as soft as a comice, but until it’s cooked its flesh remains hard, gritty and very perfumed, like an austere aunt.

Eating a quince is probably a bit too much work for our instant-gratification, soft-fruit munching society, so nobody really stocks them and they’re consumed almost exclusively by those fortunate enough to own a quince tree.  My dad’s house in Sussex boasts two such trees at the neck of the orchard (quince trees are mostly found in the UK’s sunnier nooks as they require maximum sunlight for their fruit to ripen) and they appear more dome-like and bushy than their loftier apple brethren with the most beautiful sunshine blossom in Spring – you’d think that it was they who were the king of fruits, and that the more bounteous apples behind them were the boring forgotten ones. 

Most Victorian orchards would have had a couple of quince trees and the fruit would have been served up with game or pressed to a fine jelly.  They add tradition and depth to a mixed orchard, according to my mother, who used to add a smidgeon of quince to apple crumble for an interesting aroma (not particularly popular I seem to recall).  Cooking quince with other fruit is problematic though; you have to chop it very fine as it cooks much slower than everything else.  With quinces it’s just problems, problems, problems. But it does turn a gorgeous dark red colour when cooked, so that’s a bonus.

Conjuring anything from quince is a bit of a to-do: the poor thing has to be peeled, de-cored and seeded, chopped and then roasted, baked, stewed or turned into a jam or jelly – simply torn to pieces and rebuilt to such an extent its mummy wouldn’t even recognize it.  If you’ve eaten it at all it’s probably as a dark red block of ‘membrillo’ (which is Spanish for ‘quince’) in a tapas restaurant, alongside a plate of sheep cheese - quince is ideal for making jams and jellies as it is naturally high in pectin; it was actually a fore-runner to marmalade – ‘marmelo’ being ‘quince’ in Portuguese).  

My friend Keith Goddard makes home-made membrillo at 101 Pimlico Road, his lovely modern British restaurant on the edge of Belgravia.  He describes quince as ‘really hard and ugly’ (does nobody have a good word to say?)  but sets down to work boiling them with a little lemon juice and water for an hour or so, until they’re soft enough to de-core and then cooking them for a further three hours with 2/3 their weight in sugar to bring out the natural pectin.  Then he whacks it in the fridge and – voila. Not so hard after all.

If Pimlico is too far to go for you can usually pick up membrillo at Waitrose, or any good cheese shop. And if you go to QuinceProducts.co.uk they’ll sell you such imaginative variations on the quince jelly theme as ‘Quince and Elderberry’ and ‘Hot Quince’.  Or if it’s all too much then stay online and order up some Bramley and Gage quince liqueur, throw down a couple of Quince Collinses and forget about it.

If you do want to track down the raw, hard, naked fruit in all its glory, then good luck. You’ll have to seek out a good, olde worlde, well-decked grocer like Le Pascalou on Fulham Road, but they’re not cheap at £1.99 each.  And if that doesn’t work, you could always call my dad and see if he’s got any going spare…

Also worth your attention:
Lyburn Farmhouse Cheesemakers

quinceproducts.co.uk