Cotignac of Quinces - Quince Marmalade Recipe

How to make it

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• Phil Troy's Notes on Making this recipe:
• There must be dozens of recipes in English for firm, sliceable quince jams, jellies, pastes, marmalades, and what have you.
• I chose this particular recipe because it comes the closest to what I did at the time.
• First let me point out that the season for quinces in the Eastern U.S. is from November through January.
• Back in May, while considering what to include in this basket, I ran across several jars of quince jam I had made last winter.
• The jam was made in pretty much the way dictated in the first half of the recipe above: the pulp of cooked quinces was mixed with equal parts by weight of sugar and cooked slowly until I had a dark red jam.
• Many medieval and renaissance recipes for quince marmalade call for less sugar; the recipe for cotignac in The Goodman of Paris uses honey, but I was making a modern jam, so equal parts sugar and quince it was.
• I was able to control the color of the jam by controlling the cooking time, the amount of water in the pot, and by deciding whether or not to cover it.
• Quinces are closely related to apples, and like apples, they darken as they oxidize when exposed to air.
• The difference is that quinces turn red instead of brown.
• Depending on the cooking time, they can be anywhere in a range from a rusty amber to crimson to a deep, almost black, garnet.
• This can take several hours if you want to achieve a deep red, and you need to add water every so often so it won't burn.
• To turn the jam into marmalade, you just cook it until it is stiff and pulls away from the sides of the pan, being careful not to burn it.
• A wide frying pan works well for the final boiling: you can use a blazing high heat if you stir constantly with a wooden spoon, but watch out for those superheated splashes (boiling sugar syrups are hotter than boiling water, remember).
• When the gunk holds the tracks of your spoon in soft peaks, it is done.
• It can then be molded or stamped, or put into your patented Elizabethan marmalade box, which has a pretty design or picture in negative relief on the bottom, and a perforated top to facilitate drying. I had to make do with a carved wooden shortbread stamp from Scotland, the sides built up with layers of waxed paper until the full consignment of molten quince lava would fit inside.
• When the stuff cooled, it was easy to unmold, kind of like a giant gummy bear.
• The French version of red quince marmalade, cotignac, is and has been a commercial specialty of the town of Orleans at least since the Middle Ages.
• Legend has it that it was shortly after the raising of the siege of Orleans in the Hundred Years' War that the manufacturers began stamping each round ingot of cotignac with the image of Joan of Arc on horseback, which is how it is still sold today.