quince – Rumwoldstow

Baked quince is better

Last year the quince tree was sad and gave us no quinces, despite having produced a small crop the previous year (about 4). But this year, it grew lots of lovely quinces! I have been distracted this autumn and didn’t manage to harvest most of them, but I did gather a nice basket of them and have been pondering how to cook them. I learned from a friend that there are Greek recipes for meat with quince, which I would like to try, but someone else I met last week said “just cut them into segments and bake them with cinnamon” so I tried that, and om nom nom!

I cut off the manky bits but didn’t peel them, as advised, cut them into eighths lengthwise and cut out the core. Not peeling them is a big process improvement! A raw quince is very hard and peeling is a lot of work.

I shoved the fruit in a dish, sprinkled it with cinnamon and distributed a teaspoon or two of honey around. Into the oven at 180 C for about 25 minutes, stirred round halfway through to coat the pieces in the honey.

Have I adjusted to the taste of quince? I dunno, but when I poached quince in syrup in previous years, it was ok, a bit odd… but I find the baked quince yummy and am really pleased. The cooked peel is perfectly eatable. Another time, I may serve unsweetened quince as a side dish with a meat.

Five flowers

The blossom on the first seedling to produce flowers has opened. Some sixty-ish seedlings are NOT flowering, and vary between Nothing and Lots Of Leaves. But this Gala pippin is giving it a good go. Here’s a photo from a couple of days ago.

Gala pippin’s first blossoms, Tuesday 9th April 2024

The same blossoms, Sunday 14th April 2024

The quince tree is starting to flower (mainly on the west side)

The established apple tree (variety unknown) is also in bloom

Local menace Tinky come to tell us what’s what

Quince, apples and cows

The apple harvest continues with Al bravely venturing up a ladder to pick the best of the Bramleys which we sorted and laid carefully in the apple store, on most inauthentic sheets of newspaper. We also picked the best eaters from the old tree in the orchard, which we have gradually restored to “tree shaped” after years of it being driven northwards in a quest for light which was occluded by a dark wall of leilandii.

I also picked the three “Hambledon Deux Ans” apples, the first fruit we’ve seen on the tree, which was planted in 2018. Creating an orchard is a slow game. I have not yet eaten any of them; they are supposed to be a very good keeper, so I should eat one now and then leave the others for some months at least.

Three apples from the Hambledon Deux Ans, one of the trees we planted in May 2018, and a pear from the Louise Bonne of Jersey tree planted at the same time.

The Louise Bonne of Jersey gave us half a dozen or so good pears this year; it seems to be quite biennial already so I’m glad to have put in a couple more pear trees this year.

Another first for the year is that our “Portugal” quince, planted May 2018, produced five quinces! Last year there was one very shrivelled and unappealing fruit, so this is a great step forward. I harvested them, peeled and poached them in a light syrup. They have a surprising orange fragrance.

The flavour of quince is…interesting. It’s not unpleasant, but a bit like mango I am unused to it and it’s strange to me. This variety was quick to cook and I found some interesting information about the quince in wikipedia.

The quince is another fruit, like the medlar, which may be rendered edible by “bletting” – softening by frost and subsequent decay. They are commonly cooked, being hard and astringent when raw, and the term “marmalade” originally meant a quince jam, being derived from the Portugese word for the fruit, marmelo.

The quince is traditionally used to treat digestive disorders and may reduce symptoms of early pregnancy such as vomiting and nausea; a 2016 article outlines a wealth of possible pharmaceutical uses of the fruit and seeds.

I leave you with a photo of the cattle on Lake Meadow, who kindly agreed to dispose of the windfalls that I can’t be bothered to process.