Quinces in autumn

Autumn filled the house with the subtle fragrance of quinces emanating from the bowl on the yellowwood dining room table. The fruit with their bright yellow skins brightens the quince hedge alongside the herb garden. I love the smell of quinces.

An old Cape house would seem incomplete without a quince hedge. The quince can make quite a dense hedge. I have seen them woven together to make an impenetrable barrier. The quince prefers to grow like a poplar tree or shrub.

I prefer them as trees. That means that I need to take off the new branches that grow out from the base of the trunk, on a regular basis.

As children we used to take a dinner fork and make tiny pricks all over the fruit before soaking it in salt water. This helped the fruit keep its colour and make it juicier. The fruit tends to be dry and  astringent. Nearly like the persimmon flesh before it is properly ripe.

The beautiful quince fruit has a unique fragrance that is quite hard to describe. The bowl of quinces in the dining room gives the house a historic atmosphere, as it captures a scene reminiscent of the earliest days.

The quince must surely have been one of the trees that Jan van Riebeeck planted from seeds that he brought with him. They were most likely planted in the garden that he established for the Dutch East India Company, in the heart of what is now Cape Town.

The fruit is so versatile. I love the jelly and chutney that can be made from this fragrant fruit and enjoyed with game and pork dishes. The fruit is a soft yellow colour but turns pink when cooked. It becomes the most beautiful pink jelly ideal for serving with sweet or savoury dishes.

I am curious about the history of food. Seeing a still life with quinces painted by Luis Egidio Melendez (1716 - 1780) made me realise that this fruit must have been eaten and prepared in a variety of historical dishes.

Preserves of quince were imported into England from Portugal, Genoa, Spain and France and they were known as ‘marmalades’. The word originates from the Portuguese word for quince namely, marmelo.

According to Historicfood.com, “Other names were cotoniack, quiddany and diasetonia. The last was a term used by the London apothecaries, who prescribed these sweet pastes and jellies for assisting the digestion. This was the reason why quince pastes were served after the meal during the banquet course. In 1629, John Parkinson, the Covent Garden based herbalist to James I, wrote,

"There is no fruit growing in this Land that is of so many excellent uses as this, serving as well to make many dishes of meate for the table, as for banquets, and much more for the Physicall vertues".”

Well, I am keen to discover the historical flavours of foods. I will certainly be exploring new ways of using the quince in food through a research of historical recipes.