All about quince

On September 14 Emma Crowhurst wrote about the quince and gave a recipe for quince paste. Although today we tend to think of this as purely a Spanish delicacy, it does play an important part in our own culinary history.

The quince (Cydonia vulgaris or Cydonia oblonga) is a member of the rose family and is related to both the pear and the apple and originated in Persia and Turkestan. The Greeks developed a superior variety in Kydonia (now Chania in Crete) and it’s an extremely aromatic fruit. The true quince should not be confused with the japonica (Chaenomeles japonica / cathayensis / sinensis), the fruit of which used also to be known as quince. Japonica fruit, although also edible, is extremely hard and lacks the true quince’s perfume.

The quince was grown in England during the reign of Edward I, who planted four trees at the Tower of London and was referred to by Chaucer under its French name of “coine” (now “coing”). Popular from the early 1600s when tradescant brought “Portugal” quince trees to Britain, until its decline in the early 1900s, the quince is now making a comeback.

Our very British citrus marmalade owes its origins to the fruit, as the marmalade of the 16th and 17th centuries was actually a quince paste. If made with quince, it was called marmalade, if with other fruit such as pippins (apples) or damsons, the name of the fruit was included ie damson marmalade. The word marmalade comes from “marmelo”, the Portuguese word for quince. Marmalade was first imported into this country from Portugal (the earliest records date from the 1490s), and subsequently from Spain and Italy. It was used both medicinally and as a sought-after treat to be eaten at the end of a meal with other sweetmeats and hippocras (a sweetened spiced wine with digestif properties).

Initially heavily spiced and made with honey, forerunners to this quince marmalade were known in ancient Greece and Rome. Our medieval chardequynce (flesh of quince) was also heavily spiced and made with honey, the quinces being boiled in ale-wort or beer. Pastes of other fruits such as chardewarden, using wardens or hard cooking pears, were made in the same way and Portuguese and Spanish versions were influenced by Arab cookery. They used sugar instead of honey (more on the history of sugar in another column), were not heavily spiced, but were possibly flavoured with rosewater. Our 17th century marmalade recipes are similarly flavoured with rosewater, and also musk and sometimes ambergris (both of the latter being popular flavourings of the time). Gerard’s Herball features one such recipe. As well as chardequynce and marmalade made from the fruit pulp, there was also a sweetmeat known as quidony. This was made from just the juice obtained by straining the cooked quince through a jelly bag, and boiling it up with sugar to produce a clear sweetmeat.

Eventually pippin marmalades emerged flavoured with citrus juice and candied peel. These developed into the Seville orange and other citrus marmalades we are familiar with, and which started to appear during the 18th century.