Saturday Morning Marmalade Putting Up

On Saturday morning I finally got around to dealing with that trio of quinces that I had bought in Chicago over Easter weekend. Now, kids these days are into retro. The 1970s seems to be in, for some ungodly reason. And, no doubt, once the Miami Vice movie hits theaters, we'll see the 80s make a comeback too with the aid of VH1. I'm a retro kinda guy too, it's just that when going retro, why mess around? And so I went back to the 80s for this recipe – the 1680s.

To make red Marmalade of Quinces, take a pound of Quinces and cut them in half, and take out the cores, and pare them; then take a pound of Sugar, and a quart of fair water, and put them all into a pan, and let them boyl with a soft fire, and sometimes turn and keep them covered with a pewter dish, so that the steam or air may come a little out: the longer they are in boyling, the better colour they will have: and when they be soft take a Knife, and cut them cross upon the top, it will make the syrup go through that they may be all of the like colour: then set a little of your syrup to cool, and when it beginneth to be thick, then break your Quinces with a slice or spoon, so small as you can in the pan, and then strew a little fine Sugar in your boxes bottom, and so put it up.



There's my trio of quinces. I'd never worked with them before, only eaten them. The first thing you do is peel them and then you cut them into tiny pieces. The peeling bit was a breeze but the cutting part was a real bitch. The flesh of the fruit is nice and firm but the area in the center around the seeds metastasizes somewhere along the way into titanium. Holy bejeezus! I had to hack at it to remove the tough section. And these things brown about 3 times quicker than apples so I had to quickly get a hoolie of water to store them in. Once I had them chopped into little pieces, I put them in a baking dish with some water and sugar which was swiftly put into the oven for a bit over an hour.



Nothin' says lovin' like quinces from the oven!

When the bits were nice & soft, I pulled them out and drained them. Next step was to mash them really good. And then throw the mash into a pot along with the liquid that was drained off.



Bring the stuff to a boil and then simmer the mush until it's thick. Then put it up in jars and let it cool.



Quinces are a super-high pectin fruit so, once the stuff cools, it sets just fine on its own. I had some this morning on toast and it was quite tasty. I suppose this marmalade-making venture is sort of a canning prelude for later this summer when our garden starts to yield its fruits. At the moment, our garden can be found out on the deck.



Stevie built these coffin-like mini-greenhouse hoolies. They're really slick. There are heating coils in them to keep our precious seedlings toasty warm during these chilly Wisconsin spring nights.





In addition to copious amounts of flowers, we'll have strawberries, 3 or 4 kinds of hot peppers, Bell peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, and other things that I cannot recall as it's been a couple months since we went through the seed catalog.