Banqueting stuff — preserved sweet (sweetmeat)
Keeping Quince Marmalade
PreservingReconstruction🍯 🍋moyen1 h 30 (+ drying)
A dense, translucent fruit paste made from quinces long boiled with sugar until it sets firm. Tart, fragrant, it keeps all winter and is cut into perfumed diamonds.
Banqueting stuff — preserved sweet (sweetmeat)
A dense, translucent fruit paste made from quinces long boiled with sugar until it sets firm. Tart, fragrant, it keeps all winter and is cut into perfumed diamonds.
During my years in the Netherlands, far from England and its storms, I learned from housewives the art of keeping fruits beyond their season. One cooks the quince, that tart and fragrant fruit, very long with its weight of sugar, until the paste thickens and takes on the colour of a dark ruby under the spoon. Poured into boxes and dried, it keeps for months, and one cuts a small square to close a meal or comfort a traveller. Prudence and patience: two virtues that jam teaches as well as philosophy.
Ingredients
- •Ripe quinces — several, well-scented (base fruit)
- •Sugar — about the weight of the pulp (preservation and sweetness)
- •Water — enough to cook the fruit (cooking)
- •Rose water (optional) — a few drops (fashionable perfume)
How it was made : Quince paste—ancestor of 'marmalade' in its original sense—was a major preserved sweetmeat in 16th-17th century Europe, served among the 'banqueting stuffs' at the end of prestigious meals. Sugar, still costly, acted as a preservative; the paste was moulded into shapes, sometimes gilded for grand occasions. English and Dutch made winter stores of it.