The quince harvest has come a little early this year. Not because the fruit demands it, but because someone has started swiping it.
The quince is our best cropping tree. While the apples are temperamental, performing a sort of will-I-fruit won’t-I-fruit dance with us every year, and the cherry drops its fruitlets each June like a Christmas tree its needles, the quince is totally reliable. Each year we get even more of the heavy golden, lightly scented, down-covered fruit.
They are like faux pears carved from wood and polished for some purely ornamental fruit bowl. It took us a couple of years to work out what to do with the things. We poached them, to find we had created a sort of fruity tripe, the flesh soft, blubbery, gritty and rather unappetising. It wasn’t until we discovered a copy of a thing called the Afghan Cookbook, which revealed that the quince is a mainstay of Afghan cuisine, that we had a range of really excellent recipes that produced highly palatable results.
We made great slabs of quince cheese - delighting that a square the size of a piece of Turkish delight was selling at three quid in the farmers’ market - delicious quince and orange jam and a range of casseroles which mixed quince and lamb or other meat.
This year the tree is more heavily-laden than ever. It stands to one side of our front garden, and the low hanging fruit was a useful guide when turning to drive out onto the road – they’d tap the rear windscreen when you were as close to the hedge as you ought to be.
Except the tapping stopped. The low-hanging fruit had gone. But it was not lying on the ground, or crushed beneath the wheels of the car. It had vanished. Which was puzzling until the children saw a man walking down the road suddenly veer into the drive and grab a fruit. They banged on the window; he turned, grinned, waggled his prize in the air above his head, and ran off down the road.
I asked for a description. “Hmm. Maybe Arab. Maybe Mediterranean.”
Or maybe, I thought, Afghan. A man far from home who spotted a familiar tree in a suburban front garden and thought: “I bet the people there have no idea what to do with quince and, even if they do, couldn’t be bothered anyway. I’ll have a few of those.”
Which was all very well, and if he’d knocked on the door and explained that a quince and goat casserole would dearly remind him of home I’d have given him a bag of the things. But as he hadn’t, and as I didn’t fancy seeing my one good crop of fruit whittled away by the quince raider, I got out the step ladder and picked them.
They were still rock hard, and a less golden yellow than they would be when completely ripe. Four quince weigh a couple of pounds, and I filled six carrier bags. There must be 50 of the things now sitting in the shed. I shall get to work on cooking them during the week – but it’s a busy time in other peoples’ gardens, with some big autumn clearances coming up.
I’ll make the quince and lemon or orange marmalade first, because the quince cheese – which you make as if it were jam but then go on and on stirring until the liquid becomes a thick paste – is just too labour-intensive for now.
With the marmalade, the hardest part is sawing and chopping the quince into bite-size pieces. I may need the machete. They sit in a pot with the sugar and chopped orange peel and the fruit, that starts off golden, gradually turns first rose, then pink before, finally and gloriously, you have the deepest, richest red you ever saw. It’s a preserve that has all the flavour of summer in it. The orange lifts the taste and if – as I’ve discovered – you use half the sugar the sweet-toothed Afghans would use – you get a wonderfully fruity and refreshing taste.
A taste of Afghanistan, as I’m sure my quince-scrumper would tell you.
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