Every year I look forward to picking quinces at my parents’ and making jam and other stuff from them. When I was a child we had a peach, a cherry, two pear and four apple trees and all kinds of berry bushes cramped into our really not that big garden. It was impossible to eat all of it so my granny and her sisters would spend the summer at ours baking cakes, cooking all sorts of jams, compotes and pickles for storage. The apples were taken to the local juice press where we would receive juice in glass bottles in return.
Unfortunately fruit trees don’t get very old so a lot of them don’t carry much nowadays or had to go because they had become brittle. But not the quince tree, which is now the queen of the garden! There are lots of different types of quinces which are mainly divided into apple or pear quinces, named after their shape, with apple quinces apparently being tastier.
You cannot eat quinces uncooked, they are very tough and the pips are highly poisonous when raw! They contain amygdalin which is processed to hydrocyanic acid in your guts. Heat immediately destroys the amygdalin so you definitely need to cook your quinces, especially when also using the core – which you do for example when making jam. The pips contain pectin and are responsible for the thickening of the jam. You can use just the flesh in meat dishes, like duck or beef, but I find it more satisfying to use the jam or quince paste instead as the intensely flowery and naturally astringent taste is so much more amazing with sweetness. By the way: in Germany, people use the slime of the cooked pips to treat a sore throat but I have never done this as I swear by a homemade onion & honey remedy instead – which, honestly, is a lot tastier than it sounds!
