Cooking with quinces: the art of delayed and slightly disappointed gratification
On Sunday, as I was resentfully coring quinces, I decided the rosellas were to blame.
The crimson flock descended when the plums were ripening, leaving fewer than a dozen fruit for us to enjoy. Two years ago they did the same to the quinces, leaving us with six. Six is a good number of quinces to have. You can bake two to have with ice-cream and turn two others into a ludicrously rich cake and feel very smug about the whole thing, while the final pair rot on the bench.
This year the parrots have failed me. There’s a bag of quinces blocking access to the other, better fruit in the fruit bowls. I briefly considered the mortifying possibility of embarking on the lengthy process of making quince paste, but that would only use eight and at the end of it all I would be left with quince paste, a fun substance of which I need, at the highest estimate, two tablespoons a year.
I understand now why my dad was forbidden from bringing a box of them home from his work’s communal vegetable table – a particularly country system where people who had grown so much of something that they’d become sick of it could bring it in and their colleagues would pilfer what they needed. Quinces and chestnuts were banned at our house, because while both are delicious they are more trouble than they’re worth.
I know my disdain for the knobbly yellow fruit is not widely shared. When I asked Guardian Australia’s Rural Network Facebook group for help with using up quinces I received a flood of recipes, of which many sounded delicious but all had a cooking time of more than two hours. Spending hours in the kitchen, or even indoors when not working, feels like a luxury of a past life. There is too much to be done outside to spend that much time on a tart.
Quinces are native to the Caucasus region and are reckoned by some tellings to be the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, although like other allegedly Caucasian figures in the Bible I reckon this is apocryphal. There’s no temptation in a raw quince.
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They’re also a sacred emblem of Aphrodite; the golden apple that Paris gave the goddess, for which she promised him Helen of Troy, was a quince. If that golden apple was a quince, so too may be the golden apples Heracles had to steal from Hera’s sacred tree, and the golden apples stolen from a tree belonging to the king, whose three sons each try and fail to catch the thief until his youngest succeeds. There are many versions of that tale throughout Europe and Asia and the identity of the fruit seems to vary with geography but, around the Black Sea in particular, it appears to be quince.
In Australia they never really caught on. The fruit bruises easily yet requires extensive preparation, meaning it’s not an attractive commercial proposition. And, like apricots, they’re never as good in the store as they are plucked straight from the tree.
If you can find them in a store and feel like an adventure in the art of delayed and slightly disappointed gratification, buy four. Most things worth doing with quinces can be achieved with four or fewer. It’s just enough that you get to excitedly riffle through recipes and pretend you’ve stepped into a rerun of The Cook and the Chef, and not so many that the thought of preparing them makes you break out in hives.
Our quince tree is quite old. It has been here as the property has changed hands, growing with a strong lean in the rocky soil. Our own attempts at horticulture have been slow going: the fig tree has one allegorical leaf and no fruit; the apricot drowned; and the blueberry bush died in the frost. But the quince keeps producing. The fruit is enormous – regularly over 400 grams. Our kitchen knives, which have been in need of sharpening since 2018, struggle to cut them.
It takes eight cups of water to cover four cored and quartered quinces, and 90 minutes to poach them to the correct consistency to sit in the fridge and be eaten for breakfast until we get sick of them, which is usually after about three days.
If you take some of the poaching liquid and reduce it to a syrup you can use it to make a quince gin fizz, which is the best thing I’ve discovered to do with quinces and for which, unless you are having a large cocktail party, you need approximately one quince.
But there are several kilos of quinces remaining and I refuse to be defeated. I could make quince jelly to take to visit my extended family in the hope it’s good enough to trade for the ancestral jam drops recipe, but I doubt my own jam-making abilities. I could
gently roll them under my partner’s desk until he gets sick of it and decides to make quince ice-cream. I could ding dong ditch them at my parents’ house, or join the quince fruit recipes Facebook page and learn how to make quince brandy.
Or I could bring them into the newsroom and give four to each of my colleagues, so they can enjoy exactly the correct amount of the golden fruit.
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