While visiting my best friend who now lives in a little farmhouse in Puglia in Italy, we wandered around her vineyard one afternoon in the muted sunshine where she squealed and said to me “tell me what this tree is, hubby says it’s some kind of an Italian apple but they taste awful!” – I very confidently wrinkled my brow and said “my dear I am excited to tell you, I think you have your very own quince!” So we picked some apples and some quince and trundled back to the house, gossiping about life, the universe and Everything.
Then we drank mulled wine and made chutney from things she had lying around in the cupboard so we added some onions, ginger, garlic, chillies, salt, sugar, vinegar and bubbled it all away for an hour or two. I have never actually chutney-ed quince before and it did take rather a long time to cook down but the smell was fantastic and in a month or three, I am sure she and her family are going to enjoy a fantastic reward as they pop open a jar of home-made chutney, cobbled together with fresh produce from their very own land.
For years at home, I have scoured farmshops and country roads looking for these beautiful fruits. Some years back, on a long weekend in Edinburgh, we visited a fantastic Italian deli where we bought fresh cheeses and Artisan bread and membrillo, the Spanish version of ye olde quince ‘cheese’. We sat in a park and played frisbee on a sunny day and it will remain to me as one of those happy days you always remember. I’ve never found it to buy anywhere ‘darn sarf’ since, so vowed to make it myself if and when I could locate the main ingredient.
Then magically, an enormous Waitrose carrier bag of the largest quince I have ever seen appeared on my doorstep two days after I returned from Italy. I honestly couldn’t believe my luck. My next door neighbour had ‘procured’ them for me from another villager with a huge tree bursting at the seams. So I started to scour the Internet for an appropriate recipe.
It turns out, there is not much involved in the old recipe at all. There are many newer incarnations of the original but I decided to go with the most basic. Many recipes describe pouring the mixture into a greased baking sheet then drying out in the oven, turning out, covering with a dusting of sugar and slicing into squares before storing. This is how I had the membrillo in Edinburgh, however I decided to pop mine into jars so that it would make storage and Christmas gifting all the easier.
I decided because of the original instructions to keep the skin on the fruit as well as all of the cores present during the initial cooking phase. As with apples, there is a large amount of pectin contained within these bits which we often discard at the off, and they will actually help the jelly to set without having to add any further pectin. And quite frankly I learned in Italy that these lovely fragrant souls are indeed the devil’s own work to peel so I am grateful not to have to. They are also incredibly hard even when ripe so use a sharp knife and keep your fingers well out of the way.
Basically there are only the following three ingredients: quince, sugar and water.
I scrubbed the fruit clean with a nail brush then roughly chopped, skin and cores and all. Quickly everything was submerged in a large stockpot with enough water to just cover. I do not need to give you a weight of quince as this is something you make with whatever you have and the recipe is totally adapted depending on your haul.
The next thing is to bring to the boil and leave on a medium heat to simmer gently for around 40 to 50 minutes until the fruit is completely soft and tender. Let it cool slightly before attacking gently with a potato masher to help the process along. Then place a fine metal sieve over a large jug and using a ladle, transfer several spoonfuls into the sieve and gently push through. You will end up with just liquid and a very small amount of quite fine pulp running through. The rest of the fruit will need to be discarded. Repeat until all of your cooked fruit has been sieved.
Measure the amount of fruit pulp you have ended up with in your jug and transfer to a large preserving pan. Then for every 150ml of this, add 100g of white granulated sugar. In this instance I had 2 litres of fruit pulp therefore I divided by 3 and multiplied by 2 to get the correct proportion which in this case is 1.66kg of sugar. Bring gently to the boil and simmer for around 45 minutes. The smell that engulfs your house is something quite spectacular and the colour changes to that of a blood orange. Complete magic and I found myself wondering if this was the first time this had been made in my almost 400-year-old farmhouse kitchen…
Allow to cool very slightly for around 10 minutes before using your clean ladle and a jam funnel to transfer into clean sterilised jars. After a few hours the jelly will be cooled and completely set. I have read that you need to leave this a month or two before you eat it but I will confess we tried it the next day with some bitter Parmesan and it was out of this world spectacular and every bit as good as the one we had in Edinburgh all those years ago. Traditionally in Spain, you would enjoy it with manchego.
It goes to show that sometimes nothing fancy is needed, just let good ingredients do the talking. Another fantastic example of preserving the season’s harvest and another dozen jars for me to store lol. My Christmas hampers are going to be bursting at the seams. Christmas… Eek! So excited already! 😉
makingthishouseourhome 