Or, ill-gotten gains:
Twelve pints of quince jam, plus about two pints in a container in the fridge for want of jars.
Quinces are related to apples and pears, about apple-sized, but more bulbous. I hear tell that in warmer climes the fruits ripen to edible softness, but here in the frozen tundra of the Mid-Atlantic they stay hard as the dickens despite turning from mango-green to banana-yellow. Post-harvest, the Pocket Linguist and I conned some friends into coming over to help with the peeling and coring and worm-slaughtering part of the work. Yes, worms-- the quinces we used were not grown for sale, so we had to wrest a fair number of them away
from previous claimants. I tried to drown out the worms a couple of days before using the fruit, but that only worked on three or four worms. (Not worth it, I've decided. I just lose the use of my sink and get the heebie-jeebies from seeing worms hanging half out of the quince.) (Bleargh.)Quince flesh starts out white, turning a dark orange-pink during cooking. Aside from the appeal of having pretty food, though, quince is an excellent jam fruit because the natural pectin content is so high that no additional pectin is necessary-- all you need is fruit and water.
Oh-- and sugar. Lots of sugar. More sugar, in fact, than I had left after assorted baking projects and the Pocket Linguist's batches of sorbet (spicy chocolate) and ice cream (vanilla buttermilk, mmmm). This year's jam is, perhaps, a wee bit on the sour side. Maybe just a little. Still, I can assure you that it is very tasty with ice cream, in yoghurt, and on slices of brown soda bread, and I fully expect it to be delicious as a filling for sandwich cookies. Hmmm... quince macarons, anyone?
