Quince – The forgotten fruit

I reported a few weeks ago that the quinces failed to arrive from Paris for a photo shoot. Two readers contacted me to say their garden was full of them and they could hardly give them away. Better still, that day an old friend rang to ask if I wanted the usual consignment from his Warwickshire garden, paid for in kind. By the next day I was awash with quinces, large and small.

The fact remains that, despite their plenitude, quinces simply do not figure as a commercial item in Britain. No doubt readers will email to tell me their local farmers’ market has an abundance of the curiously misshapen and knobbly fruit. This may be the case but it is a rare and specialist shop, certainly not a supermarket, that will stock quinces.

Perhaps it is understandable. The quince is the only fruit that must be cooked to be edible (a friend denied this and claimed that back home in Egypt they ate them raw, but I am sceptical). Once cooked – and cooked for a long time until the flesh turns an orange-pink, the colour of Petra or Jaipur – the quince is deeply fragrant and the flavour a long and complex one. It is not, in other words, especially accessible, like a banana, a tangerine or the sweet and crunchy apples produced for the modern market.

Difficult to find then, and not immediately accessible to eat, the quince redeems itself by being exceptionally easy to cook. Having made quince paste and pickles and having poached quinces in aromatic syrups and various other preparations, I now fall back on a recipe cited by Jane Grigson as Isaac Newton’s Baked Quince.

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What the connection was between fruit and physicist I have, as yet, been unable to ascertain: perhaps the discovery of the law of gravity was occasioned not by an apple but by a quince. Had it been a quince as large as those in the photograph, the revelation would indeed have come as a thunderbolt.

Rowley Leigh is the chef at Le Café Anglais

[email protected].

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Baked quinces with ricciarelli biscuits

A ricciarello is a Sienese version of a macaroon or amaretto: it should be crisp on the outside, chewy within. They are very simple to make.

Ingredients

4 large quinces

2 lemons

75g unsalted butter

100g light brown caster sugar

300g ground almonds

350g caster sugar

½ tsp almond essence

1 tbsp honey

3 egg whites

Icing sugar to dust

A handful of blanched whole almonds

? Peel the quinces and remove their cores. Grate the zest of the lemons and save it for the biscuits – see below. Squeeze the juice and roll the quince pieces thoroughly in this juice. Lay the quinces in an oven dish and put a small piece of butter and a teaspoon of sugar over each one. Add a cup – say 150 ml – of water and cover the dish with foil. Bake the quinces in a medium oven – 150°C – for at least an hour and a half until they turn a deep pink colour and become extremely fragrant. Leave them to cool in their own juice.

? Mix together the almonds and sugar well before incorporating the almond essence, lemon zest and honey. In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until they begin to stiffen and then blend very thoroughly into the mix to form a sticky dough.

? Dust a sheet of greaseproof with icing sugar and place the dough on top. Dust with more sugar and then cover with greaseproof and roll out the dough into a rectangle some two centimetres thick. Cut the dough into long strips and then cut at an angle into rhomboid shapes. Place an almond on top of each shape and transfer to another sheet of greaseproof on a baking tray, dusted with icing sugar.

? Dust the biscuits with more icing sugar and bake in the same medium oven for 20 minutes. Give a final dusting with icing sugar and leave to cool. Serve the quince at room temperature with the biscuits and some cream, crème fraiche or ice cream.

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