One of the most fashionable ways either to start or to finish an urban dinner party these days is with slices of salty Manchego cheese and squares of quivering membrillo, the sweet jellied quince paste from Spain, which is prized by foodies everywhere as the ultimate in exotic food.
Yet if "local produce" - that mantra of the well-heeled - really counted for anything, quince paste ought to seem less exotic to us than the orange marmalade we spread on our morning toast. Quinces, unlike Seville oranges, have always grown well in Britain. It was only in the 20th century that they ceased to be part of our ordinary repertoire of sweet dishes. It is rather topsy-turvy that it should take the coarse quince pastes of Spain to reintroduce us to this native fruit, when we have in our own traditional armoury several recipes for rather finer quince dishes than membrillo.
Elinor Fettiplace, for example, was an Elizabethan lady in an Oxfordshire manor as well as a very good cook. Her manuscript receipt book, edited by Hilary Spurling, contains a recipe for a lovely pink brick of quince paste. It reads: "Take your quinces and rost them, then take the best of the meat of them, & way to every pound of it, a pound of sugar & beate it together in a morter, & boyle it till it be so thick that it come from the posnet [that is, the cooking pot] then mould it and print it, & dry it before the fire."
Spurling suggests that the quinces need an hour or two in a warm oven before being cooled, cored, chopped and sieved or blended. Weigh the puree and cook it in a thick-bottomed pan with an equal weight of sugar, slowly simmering it, stirring often, until the intensely fragrant mixture begins to leave the sides of the pan. There's no need to set it in a mould, unless you happen to have a pretty one - a plain lined tin will do just as well.
This was one variant of the original marmalade (a word of Portuguese origin). Expert jam-makers of the 17th century would boil up both white and red versions. White marmalade was pale rather than white, an effect achieved by boiling the preserve fast and uncovered in as little liquid as possible. Red marmalade, on the other hand, used long slow cooking in sugared water to exploit the magical ability of quinces to turn from hard yellow fruit to deep soft red candy.
One of the best recipes in Nigella Lawson's new book (Forever Summer, Chatto & Windus, £20), for "red roast quinces", fits in to this tradition, though she does not say so: halved quinces are slowly baked in quince-flavoured syrup until ruby-red and as "darkly sticky as toffee apples".
But the most brilliant-sounding quince recipe I have read in anticipation of the new season comes not from Nigella, but from Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65), the alchemist and diplomat. It is for "a soothing quiddany or gelly of the cores of quinces". I haven't tried it yet, never having accumulated enough quince cores, but quote it in the hope that some NS readers may have access to a quince tree.
In case you are tempted, a pottle is two quarts.
"Take only the Cores, and slice them thin, with the seeds in them. If you have a pound of them, you may put a pottle of water to them. Boil them, till they be all Mash, and that the water hath drawn the Mucilage out of them, and that the decoction will be a gelly, when it is cold. Then let it run through a wide strainer or fit colender (that the gross part may remain behind, but all the slyminess go through) and to every pint of Liquor take about half a pound of double refined Sugar, and boil it up to a gelly."
