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[Lesley Cox]

Welcome home again Fermi. I'll bet you had a brilliant time and we're looking forward to hearing (and seeing) about it.

Yes, very nice dessert for home-coming. What is also worth noting is that the fruiting quince tree has truly beautiful flowers, rather like apple flowers but larger and lighted fragrant. With its old-looking, rather gnarled trunk, it's altogether something well worth growing.

[Paddy Tobin]

Lesley,

Would you believe I saw quince jelly - same as your 'paste' by the sound of it - for the first time about a fortnight ago in a new cheese shop which opened. Fabulous on a cracker with stilton.

Later on in our season I must pester you for another quince recipe. The quince tree has had a good set of fruit so I wait in eager anticipation of picking them.

Paddy

[Maggi Young]

I also make a quince paste which is a bit like the fruit leathers one can buy

says Lesley.....
What the blue blazes are "fruit leathers" when they're at home? Or even out on the tiles!! What the name suggests to me are those strips of dried mangoes etc that are soft and chewy and thoroughly delicious.... but you can't SPREAD them on anything...?? Never heard the term before... explanation, please!

[Lesley Cox]

Jelly, Paddy is like an apple jelly, wobbly and quite transparent, if made well, and very spreadable. The paste is made from the whole fruit flesh (the solids aren't strained out) cooked to a mush then sugar added and very slow cooked to a very thick paste. I'm trying to think of something with a similar texture. (Imagine mashed potatoes, solid but spreadable.) It cooks to a glorious crimson colour so is beautiful as well as tasty. It's then dried quite a lot and becomes slicable, but not so much as for a leather. It takes a while to make but well worth it. I'll send the recipe privately.

Maggi, the leathers are exactly what you suggest. The fruit is dried usually in a dehydrator then spread very thinly to dry. It becomes dry to the touch. Different from the quince paste which has sugar whereas the leathers don't and so are not sticky to touch once well dried. The thin sheets are then cut into wide slices and rolled up. Very chewy. They can be made with just about any fruit, peaches, apricots, various berries, apples, whatever, and would have the seeds strained out before drying. They're great in kids' lunch boxes or for snacks, being sugar-free. Good too on a climb up a mountain instead of chocolate.

[Maggi Young]

YUMMY!!

[Paddy Tobin]

Lesley,

Your description of quince paste is exactly as we attribute to quince jelly, thick, very very well set, almost hard, slicable, not really spreadable - cracker, slice of stilton, slice of quince jelly = beautiful.

Yes, just as you say, apple jelly is a much softer set and is a strained jam. We usually make it with crab apples collected in the nearby ditches.

By the way, this is our time for making elderflower cordial, flowers collected from the trees around the farm, a few of the  pink flowers from the dark leaved cultivars added to give a lovely pinkish colour to the cordial. Lovely with chilled sparkling water.

Paddy

[Casalima]

Portugal is the quince paste country. The Portuguese word for quince is marmelo and marmelada is quince paste/cheese. This word has of course now travelled all over the world as "marmalade" etc etc. - forget all those phony etimologies for the word marmalade!
The Spanish also enjoy quince paste, which they call "membrillo" (both the fruit and the paste). "Pâte de coing" in France.

Chloë
(still overworked, in hot north Portugal)