Quince Jelly

The tomatoes really are coming on quicker than we can manage now. You can take off a dozen new fruits every day, and still have another dozen to do the next day. We’ve run out of things we can make with them.

So this weekend we’ve been picking and eating them, mainly in sandwiches, and turning our attention sweeter pleasures.

There’s a quince tree in the front garden, which has been ripe for picking for almost a month. Quince is a funny fruit. It’s not attractive, it grows itself around the branches of its tree, its sticky, and it doesn’t smell too good. You also don’t seem to be able to buy them in the shops, so you really do need to have your own bush, or know someone who has one to get your hands on some. All that aside, it does make a very sweet jelly that’s a wonderful pinky red in the jar.

Quince in the pan

We took a little over 2kg from the tree, washed and halved them, and then boiled them in three pints of water for an hour and a half. By then, they were mushy and soft, the pips had come out and the skins had rolled themselves off. We scooped them from the jam pan into a muslin pouch, stretched out over a tripod stand and left to drip out into a mixing bowl until the next morning.

That gave us about three pints of syrup - almost the same as the amount of water we put onto the fruit, and added a pound of jam sugar for each pint. Putting it back in the pan, we boiled it up until the sugar had all dissolved, then added the juice of a lemon and kept up the heat until it reached 105 degrees.

At that temperature it starts to set, so you syphon off half a spoonful and drop it onto a saucer. Two minutes later, when it’s had time to cool, you run your finger through it and, if it crinkles up with a skin, it’s ready to be put into jars. We got 10 half-pound (8oz) jars from it.

Our other makings were far easier, and much quicker. We bought a can of Ma Mada marmalade. It’s not actually marmalade, but bitter Seville oranges cut into pieces and marinaded in water and pectin to make it set.

Marmalade

To make things a bit more interesting, we finely chopped some fresh ginger and stirred this into the mix, along with three quarters of a pint of water and four pounds of sugar.

It very quickly starts to turn into what looks like marmalade. The sugar quickly dissolves, and you only need boil it for 15 minutes or so before doing the finger-through-jam-on-saucer trick above (although getting it to the boil takes a little longer).

From that single 94p can of fruit we got 12 jars of orange and ginger marmalade, or 8oz each. That should keep us going through the winter.