Quince

• 1. Introduction

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  The quince, Cydonia oblonga, can grow as heavy as one kilogram and still be too tart to bite into. Its skin turns a bright golden yellow and its aroma carries, yet the flesh stays hard and astringent. It looks much like a pear and belongs to the same family as apples. Even so, it stands alone. It is the only member of its genus, Cydonia. So where did this stubborn fruit come from, and why did so many cultures keep planting it? What made ancient Greeks tie it to love, and what do cooks do with a fruit that resists being eaten raw? The answers begin with the tree itself and travel through Iran, Crete, medieval England and the colonies of New England.

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• 2. The Tree Itself

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  A mature quince stands four to six metres tall and three to four and a half metres wide, more shrub than timber tree. Its young twigs are covered in grey down, and its oval leaves are downy underneath. The flowers come singly in late spring, after the leaves, and they are white or pink. Gardeners have long valued those pale pink blossoms, and the plant is sometimes trained as a miniature bonsai. The fruit is larger than many apples and may be pear-shaped or roughly spherical. Gritty stone cells are scattered through its flesh. The seeds hold a hidden hazard. They contain nitriles, a compound common in the seeds of the rose family. In the stomach, enzymes or acid, or both, break some of these down into hydrogen cyanide, a toxic volatile gas. The seeds only cause harm when eaten in large quantities. That danger is one reason cooks later learned to clear the seeds away before making drinks from the fruit.

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• 3. Roads From Iran

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  The Hyrcanian forests south of the Caspian Sea in Iran are the native home of the quince. From that centre of origin, Neolithic farmers carried it outward in every direction between 5000 and 3000 BC. It reached secondary centres in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Syria. From there, local landraces were distributed across Europe, Russia, China, India and North Africa. In Europe the fruit gained royal attention. Charlemagne directed that quinces be planted in well-stocked orchards. In England the first record dates to about 1275, when Edward I had some planted at the Tower of London. Settlers brought the tree to North America in the 17th century, and to Central and South America in the 18th. By then it had become an ordinary garden fixture. Ann Leighton, working from records of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, notes that an 18th-century New England vegetable garden always had a quince at its lower corner.

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• 4. Names and Ancient Orchards

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  Akkadian speakers called the fruit supurgillu, a collective plural meaning quinces. The word was borrowed into Aramaic as sparglin. In Judea, Mishnaic Hebrew used prishin, a loanword from Jewish Palestinian Aramaic that carries the sense of "the miraculous fruit". The quince flourished in the heat of the Mesopotamian plain, where apples did not, and it was cultivated around the Mediterranean from an archaic period. The Greeks tied it to Kydonia on Crete and spoke of the "Cydonian pome". The philosopher Theophrastus, in his Enquiry into Plants, noted that quince was one of many fruiting plants that do not come true from seed. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, mentions numerous varieties and describes four. Keeping the fruit was a real problem, because quinces are ripe on the tree only briefly. The Roman cookbook De re coquinaria of Apicius advised choosing perfect, unbruised fruits, keeping stems and leaves intact, and submerging them in honey and reduced wine. The English name preserves the Cretan link. It arose in the 14th century as a plural of quoyn, understood as a singular. That came through Old French cooin from Latin cotoneum malum and cydonium malum, ultimately from Greek kydonion mēlon, "Kydonian apple".

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• 5. Growing Quince

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  Temperatures under 7 C for part of the year are what make a quince flower properly. Beyond that requirement, the plant asks for little. It is hardy and drought-tolerant, adapts to many soils of low to medium pH, and tolerates both shade and sun. Sunlight is still needed for larger flowers and fully ripened fruit. It tolerates years without pruning, and it is cultivated on all continents in warm-temperate and temperate climates. Commercial growers propagate it by cuttings or layering. Cuttings give better plants but take longer to mature. Named cultivars are grafted onto quince rootstock, and seed is not used commercially. Left alone, the plant forms thick bushes, so growers prune it down to a single stem to make fruit-bearing trees. The tree is self-pollinated but yields better when cross-pollinated. Fruits are left on the tree to ripen fully and are harvested in late autumn, before the first frosts. In warmer climates they may soften enough to eat. Quince also serves as rootstock for certain pear cultivars. In Europe it is grown in small amounts, typically one or two trees in a mixed orchard of apples and other fruit trees.

  Trouble does come. Aphids, scale insects, mealybugs and moth caterpillars such as leafrollers and codling moths all attack it. In hot weather it may develop fungal diseases that cause premature leaf fall. Quince leaf blight, caused by the fungus Diplocarpon mespili, threatens it in wet summers with severe leaf spotting and early defoliation. Cedar-quince rust, caused by Gymnosporangium clavipes, needs two hosts to complete its life cycle, usually a juniper and a member of the rose family. It appears as red growths on the plant and may affect quinces grown near junipers.

  In 2023, world production of quinces was 687,036 tonnes, and Turkey and China together accounted for 44% of it. Cultivars include 'Champion', 'Cooke's Jumbo', 'Dwarf Orange', 'Pineapple', 'Portugal' and 'Smyrna'. Two of them, 'Vranja' Nenadovic and 'Serbian Gold', have earned the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.

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• 6. In the Kitchen

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  Raw quince is 84% water and 15% carbohydrates, with negligible fat and protein. A 100 g portion provides 238 kJ of food energy and 17% of the Daily Value for vitamin C. Its real character lies in its aroma, flavour and tartness, which are intense. Most varieties are too hard and tart to eat raw, though a few, such as 'Aromatnaya' and 'Kuganskaya', can be. Cooks roast, bake or stew the peeled fruit, or turn it into jam, marmalade, jelly or pudding. Quince is high in pectin, which is why it sets so well, though pectin levels fall as the fruit ripens. Long cooking with sugar turns the flesh red, thanks to pigmented anthocyanins. A diced quince added to apple sauce lifts the taste of the apples, and small amounts go into apple pies and jam. The word "marmalade" originally meant a quince jam and comes from the Portuguese word for the fruit.

  On the Iberian Peninsula, slow cooking of quince with sugar produced quince cheese, a firm, sticky, sweet, reddish paste. The Spanish-speaking world calls it dulce de membrillo and eats it with manchego cheese. In the Levant, especially Syria, quince is added to chicken or to kibbeh for an intense and unusual taste, as in kibbeh safarjaliyeh.

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• 7. The Quince Drink

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  In the Balkans, quince becomes rakija, an eau-de-vie. Ripe fruits of sweeter varieties are washed and cleared of rot and seeds. They are then crushed or minced and mixed with cold or boiling sweetened water and yeast. The mash ferments for several weeks. One distillation yields a spirit of 20-30 ABV, while a second produces a liquor of roughly 60% ABV. The two distillates may be mixed or diluted with distilled water to reach a final strength of 42-43% ABV.

  An English account of a very different quince drink comes from Carolina in 1709. The explorer and naturalist John Lawson wrote that he was "not a fair judge of the different sorts of Quinces which they call Brunswick, Portugal and Barbary". Of the fruit, he said, "they make a wine or liquor which they call Quince-Drink and which I approve of beyond any drink that their country affords... The Quince-Drink most commonly purges".

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• 8. Love and Verse

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  In a lost poem by Callimachus, which survives only in a prose epitome, a quince carries a vow. A young man named Acontius sees his beloved in the courtyard of the temple of Aphrodite, to whom the quince is a sacred emblem. He plucks a quince from the "orchard of Aphrodite" and inscribes its skin. He then rolls it furtively to the feet of her illiterate nurse. The nurse's curiosity is aroused, and she hands it to the girl to read aloud. The girl finds herself saying, "I swear by Aphrodite that I will marry Acontius". A vow spoken in the goddess's temenos cannot be broken.

  In Plutarch's Lives, the lawmaker Solon is said to have decreed that "bride and bridegroom shall be shut into a chamber, and eat a quince together." Some ancients called the fruit "golden apples", and the hero Hercules is associated with golden apples that some scholars think were probably quinces. When a baby is born in the Balkans, a quince tree is planted as a symbol of fertility, love and life.

  Edward Lear gave the fruit a place in English nonsense verse in 1870. In The Owl and the Pussycat, the two lovers dine this way: "They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon; and hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon." Writing in The Guardian, Kate Young observes that the poem may be nonsense, but slices of quince work well with a meringue and whipped cream dessert.

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