A lovely present from a young couple who have made a great success of their suburban garden - a quince, the first of the crop, all yellow and furry, about the size of your average shop apple. The first thing to be said about it is that, placed on the sideboard, it fills the dining-room and corridor with its gentle, pervasive scent. Just one quince. The temptation, of course, is to bite into it, but though fully developed, the quince is still as hard as the hob of hell, and often remains so for a long time.
Therefore it is used in many ways in cooking, in making jam or jelly or, best of all, quince paste, in which form it is eaten as a sweetmeat - slabs of it, about an inch high, a lovely pink colour and, people say, ideal to eat with your coffee either at elevenses or after a meal. If you are cooking an apple tart, a slice or two of quince helps the flavour, and this can be done even when it is still hard. Not much grown in Ireland, you might think. When that shop Here Today was in Anne Street, Dublin, it now and then had them, so Dubliners could probably get some at the markets. Many people who have never seen or eaten quince will remember from Edward Lear's nonsense poem about the owl and the pussycat who went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, that "they dined on mince and slices of quince/ Which they ate with a runcible spoon".
The importance of the quince in cookery may be judged from the fact that Sophie Grigson, in her hefty Fruit Book (Penguin Cookery Library), gives a dozen pages to the fruit and its uses. People say, she writes, that for the Greeks and Romans quinces were the golden Apples of Hesperides, the golden apples that prevented Atlanta winning the race.
But Sophie Grigson's recipes are precise and mouth-watering. It's such a pity that the beautiful-smelling fruit can't be bitten into instantly. She says a Greek greengrocer in London told a friend that, at home, his family hang up the best of the crop - presumably in a cool place - and by February they taste soft and sweet enough to eat without cooking. She wonders if these are a different variety.
Maybe that's what we'll do with our gift. But the room will lose a lot without that lovely smell. A recipe from God knows where means that we have still a remains of a quince liqueur made years ago - and forgotten until now.
Y