The Honey Apple

 The quinces had been sitting in a bowl on the kitchen table for four days, and by the end of the week the entire room smelled of them. It is a remarkable smell — floral, honeyed, faintly tropical, somewhere between an apple, a pear, and an expensive candle — and it fills a space the way no other fruit I know quite manages. Guests kept asking what it was. I kept gesturing proudly at the bowl. The quinces sat there, golden and downy and glowing, looking for all the world like the most delicious things ever to occur in nature.

Reader, I bit one.

I would like to say I was young and foolish, but I was neither. I simply could not believe that something that looked like that, and smelled like that, could possibly be as advertised by the various people who had warned me. Surely, I thought, the rawness was overstated. Surely one small, exploratory bite of this radiant golden fruit would reward me with something like the perfume made solid.

What I got instead was a mouthful of what I can only describe as astringent wood. The flesh was hard enough to give my teeth pause, dry, tannic, and so mouth-puckeringly sour that my whole face performed a manoeuvre it had not attempted since childhood. The perfume, so generous in the air, had utterly declined to appear on the tongue. I stood at the counter making a noise, holding a bitten quince, feeling the specific foolishness of a man who has been told a thing by everyone he knows and has decided, on no evidence whatsoever, to find out for himself.

The quince, I now understand, has been doing this to optimists for about four thousand years.

Here is the fundamental fact about the quince, the fact that governs everything else: it is a fruit that flatly refuses to be eaten raw. Where its cousins the apple and the pear have spent centuries being bred sweeter and softer and friendlier, the quince has remained magnificently, stubbornly hostile — hard as a cricket ball, sour as a scolding, packed with tannins that dry your mouth like a bad cup of tea. You cannot pick a quince off the tree and eat it. You cannot slice it into a lunchbox. It gives you, raw, precisely nothing.

And yet — this is the whole strange romance of the thing — cook it, slowly, for a long time, with sugar, and it performs something close to alchemy.

This is genuinely one of the small marvels of the kitchen, and it is worth describing properly, because it never stops being surprising. You take those pale, hard, unpromising yellow lumps, and you peel and core and chop them (a labour in itself; cutting a raw quince is closer to carpentry than cookery), and you put them in a pan with sugar and let them cook, and cook, and cook. For a while nothing much happens. And then, slowly, over an hour or two or three, the flesh begins to change colour — from pale cream to pink, from pink to apricot, from apricot to a deep, glowing, rose-gold amber, sometimes almost ruby. Nobody has added anything red. The colour comes from within, drawn out by the long heat, the fruit's own hidden compounds transforming under time and temperature into something that looks like stained glass. And as it changes colour it changes character entirely: the astringency vanishes, the harsh perfume mellows into a honeyed floral sweetness, and the wood becomes silk. The fruit that gave nothing raw gives, cooked, one of the loveliest flavours in the whole autumn larder.

It is a fruit, in other words, that has to be transformed in order to be loved at all. There is a lesson in there somewhere, though I have never been quite sure whether it is an encouraging one or a slightly alarming one.

The quince is also, thanks to all that hardness, extraordinarily high in pectin — the natural setting agent that makes jams gel — and rich in perfume, which is why, for most of its history, this fruit has been valued above all as the fruit for making preserves. Long before anyone worked out that you could set a jam with commercial pectin, the quince set itself. Cook it down far enough and it firms into a dense, sliceable paste, sweet and tart and floral, that keeps for months and pairs — universally, across every culture that makes it — with a sharp, salty cheese.

And here we arrive at my favourite fact about this entire fruit, which is a word you use all the time without knowing it belongs to the quince.

Marmalade.

You think of marmalade as an orange thing. A breakfast thing. A bitter-sweet spread for toast, faintly British, definitely citrus. But the word did not start there, and for most of its life it had nothing to do with oranges at all. Marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelada, which means quince paste — and marmelada comes from marmelo, which is simply the Portuguese word for quince. Trace it back further and it runs through Latin to the Greek melimelon: meli, honey, and melon, apple. The honey apple. That is what the ancient world called the quince, and that is the ancestor, buried four languages deep, of the jar in your fridge.

So the original marmalade was quince paste, full stop. The Portuguese were making and exporting marmelada — solid, sliceable quince sweetmeat — across Europe by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when sugar was a luxury and the stuff was prized as a treat for the wealthy. It was only later, in England in the 1600s, that cooks started applying the word to other fruits, and above all to oranges; and it was the Scots, in the 1700s, who had the further idea of loosening it into the soft, spreadable, peel-suspended breakfast stuff we now mean by the word. The orange marmalade on your toast is, etymologically speaking, a quince paste that wandered off, changed fruit, moved to Scotland, and softened up in its old age.

There is a wonderful story about the word that I am obliged, sadly, to demolish. The tale goes that "marmalade" comes from ma Marie est malade — "my Mary is ill" — supposedly murmured by the French chef of Mary, Queen of Scots, as he prepared the restorative preserve for his ailing mistress. It is a delicious story. It has everything: a tragic queen, a devoted cook, a bit of French. It is also, I am afraid, complete nonsense — the Portuguese marmelo predates poor Mary by centuries, and historians file the whole thing firmly under folklore, alongside all the other etymologies that are too charming to be true. I include it only because it is exactly the sort of story I would want to be true, and because there is a particular pleasure in a fact that is lovely and wrong.

But back to the fruit.

What strikes me most about the quince is how a fruit that so much of the modern West has half-forgotten is, across a great arc of the world, absolutely central — and how it goes by a different name in every kitchen that cooks it. The paste alone is a small atlas. In Spain it is dulce de membrillo, eaten in slabs with Manchego in a pairing so classic it has its own shorthand — queso y membrillo. In Portugal it is the original marmelada. In Catalonia it is codonyat; in the Basque country, irasagarra; in Italy, cotognata; in France, pâte de coing. And in Britain, with the flat poetry the English reserve for food they secretly love, it is simply "quince cheese," which sounds like something you'd apologise for at a buffet.

The Spanish version carries its own deep history. Dulce de membrillo as it exists today owes a great debt to Moorish Andalusia, where Arab cooks brought both sugarcane and the sophisticated art of fruit-preserving to the Iberian peninsula more than a thousand years ago, and turned the local quince into a sweetened paste. Much of what we think of as quintessentially Spanish, here, is in fact Al-Andalus — the sugar, the technique, the whole idea. When the Spanish and Portuguese later crossed the Atlantic they carried the quince and its paste with them, which is why you find it in Latin America too, as ate in Mexico, still cooked and sliced and served with cheese exactly as it is in Extremadura.

And the paste is only the sweet half of the fruit's life. Go east from the Mediterranean and the quince stops being a confection and becomes a serious savoury ingredient — arguably more at home there than it ever was in the West. In Iran it goes into khoresh-e beh, a slow-braised stew of quince with lamb, where the fruit's floral sourness cuts the richness of the meat in a way no apple could. In Morocco it turns up in tagines, cooked long with lamb and honey and warm spices. Across Turkey and the Balkans it is baked whole and slow into ayva tatlısı, that same rose-gold transformation deployed as a glorious dessert, served with clotted cream. The fruit that gives Western Europe its cheeseboard sweet is, a little further east, the thing that makes the stew sing. It turns out the quince is not really a niche fruit at all. It is a staple that the modern Western supermarket simply happened to drop, somewhere in the twentieth century, in favour of things you can eat without lighting the oven.

Which brings me to the quince's oldest and grandest claim, the one that lifts it out of the larder and into mythology. When the Greeks spoke of the golden apples — the apples of the Hesperides that Heracles was sent to fetch, the golden apple of discord that Paris awarded to Aphrodite and so set off the whole calamity of Troy, the fruit sacred to Aphrodite herself and given at weddings as a token of love — there is a strong scholarly case that the fruit they actually meant was not the apple at all, but the quince. The quince was Aphrodite's fruit, the fruit of love and marriage, pressed into the hands of Greek brides, tangled up in the Western imagination with beauty and desire and catastrophe for the better part of three thousand years.

Sit with that a moment. The most romantic fruit in the entire mythology of the West — the golden fruit that started a war, the love-token of the goddess of love — may well be this one: the hard, sour, woody thing in my bowl that cannot be eaten raw, that fooled me into biting it, that gives you nothing at all unless you are prepared to spend an afternoon coaxing it into rose-gold submission. Which is either the least romantic fruit imaginable or, if you think about it the right way, the most: a beauty that demands to be worked for, that withholds everything until you have earned it, and that repays the patience with something genuinely golden.

The Greeks may have understood the quince better than we do.

The bitten quince went, eventually, into the pot with all its brothers, and I spent an afternoon of my life peeling and chopping and stirring, and watched the pale hard lumps do their slow, improbable turn from cream to pink to deep amber, and poured the result into a dish to set, and ate a slice that evening with a wedge of sharp cheese and a genuine sense of having been somewhere and back.

And I thought: this is the fruit of the season we are now in. All summer I chased fruit that asked nothing — the apricot warm off the branch, the fig split with a thumb, the cherry eaten by the handful, generous and immediate and gone in a day. The quince is the opposite of all of them, and it arrives precisely as they leave, because it is autumn's fruit through and through: nothing quick, nothing raw, nothing for free. It wants your time, your patience, a hot oven and a long afternoon. It wants you to earn it. And that, it turns out, is exactly the deal that the whole darkening half of the year is offering — the soups, the slow braises, the ovens left on for the warmth as much as the food. Summer feeds you fast and asks nothing. Autumn makes you work, and pays you in gold.

I still wouldn't recommend biting one. But I understand now why, for four thousand years, people kept the tree.