A CROP OF QUINCE

Ahhhh, quinces - another reason to love autumn. A friend filled us a boxful of downy fruit from her garden - pale yellow, huge and knobbly, aromatic. We piled them up in a basket to enjoy the look and smell of them while dawdling over gastronomic choices, considering experiments. The first batch perfumed the whole house as they baked overnight in a slow oven, turning wine-red in the process. We shared some with guests one night for dessert, topped with vanilla yoghurt, and had the rest for breakfast.

With one success under the belt, we took on the jelly challenge. Quinces are rich in pectin: all the books say so. The books also agree that a slow dripping process - preferably through muslin - will produce a cloudless outcome. But no two recipes agree on the proportion of sugar to fruit, nor on how to conduct the measuring. As a result, our first cloudless outcome was so sweet you could barely taste the quince. More like a super-sweet jelly. Looks lovely, though - a clear deep red - on a sunny windowsill, waiting for serving suggestions. How could anyone bear to throw away all that work? All those quinces? All that sugar? Oh, and ever economical, we tried stewing the fruit left in the muslin, but its best flavour and colour had leached away with the juices, leaving a second hand sort of quince: dark brown and rather limp.  Our third project: quince paste. I culled recipes from the Net, choosing a winner from Italy because it seemed the least labour-intensive. Instead of hours spent trickling and stirring water into simmering quinces, we only had to dry bake them before the stir-in-sugar stage. After that, spread on trays the viscous mixture dried out nicely over a heating duct, producing thick, mahogany red sheets to cut, wrap and store in the fridge. Proudly I sent three little boxes to friends overseas; some local friends have also been lucky enough to receive a precious sample.  Mine was hardly the only Melbourne household to take on a quince paste project. One friend brought me a sample of his, boasting that he and a neighbour drank two bottles of wine as they did it the long way. His offering is pale pink, perfectly formed, and cuts like cheese: it looks so professional alongside our rustic stuff. Oh, well, we might have lost out on appearance, but we sure made up for it in flavour intensity.  If this all sounds too mouth-watering, do I risk a flood of requests for samples? Rest assured we deemed it sufficiently worth the time and effort to do it all again with the final batch of fruit. Quince paste partners well with most cheeses, but with cream cheese it is a flavour marriage from heaven.   Hilary Ash August 2004

 

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