Quinces: Recipes for Baked Quinces and a Quince Sambal

Unloved and perhaps perceived as unlovely, quinces are a curiosity for many cooks who did not grow up with the fragrant fruit. Like apples, they ripen in fall, and come to market at the same time. Unlike apples, they remain an enigma. Chefs might pounce on them, and anyone with quince-eating cultural roots will scoop them up with delight. Owls and pussy cats like them (eaten with a “runcible” spoon). But often, quinces sold in the US languish. Pick up a fruit, and breathe it in. It is intoxicatingly aromatic, and its floral scent translates into flavor when it is cooked. Raw, quinces can be eaten as a lightly spiced sambal.

You’ll find the recipes below.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

Uncooked, quinces are dense and difficult to slice, and their flavor is astringent. Salting the raw, grated fruit tames its tannins, while cooking makes quinces versatile enough to be eaten as a dessert, a preserve, a jelly (like membrillo), or as a savory addition to North African tagines and other meaty dishes. Cooked quinces’ flavor is gently apple-like, and their scent somehow conveyed in each bite.

Originating somewhere around Western Asia and the Caucasus, quinces have been cultivated for millennia around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East. Turkey produces the most quinces for export. The fruit I encounter at greenmarkets in New York City are grown in the Hudson Valley, in USDA hardiness zone 6a. Quince trees are hardy down to Zone 5 and have significant cold-tolerance. While the fruit requires summer rainfall, the humid, tropical summers of the Northeast are not ideal. Humidity encourages fungal infections, and cold winters might also see damage to the tree’s early, beautiful blossoms. Cedar apple rust, hosted by Juniperus virginiania (eastern red cedar), and blight are potential issues on this coast. The quince’s happiest place is anywhere with long, hot, dry summers.

My own quince background belongs to South Africa, where the fruit is associated with the dusty roads of farms in the Karoo and Overberg regions, and where they hang like fat, pale moons on branches bent low by their weight in late summer.

The way quinces are prepared in South Africa is influenced by Cape Malay traditions, centered around Cape Town. This cooking-style is a blend of Dutch colonial cooking and Afro-Asian influences brought to the Dutch colony by enslaved people and political exiles from the East Indies (present-day Indonesia), Southeast Asia, and Madagascar in the 17th and 18th centuries. Quinces in South Africa are typically eaten as a fruit leather, a sweet preserve served in its pink syrup, in a savory bredie (a slow-cooked mutton stew featuring a single, seasonal vegetable), or a sambal (a refreshingly spicy fruit or vegetable condiment).

When I find quinces (usually grown by Locust Grove Farms, New York), from fall though winter at greenmarkets, I do two things: Bake them for dessert, with fresh, home-grown bay leaves and foraged juniper, or with fir sugar; and grate up a spicy sambal, whose recipe comes from a cookbook that is also a piece of Africana: Hilda Gerber’s Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays. It is essentially a transcribed, invaluable oral history, published posthumously from a manuscript Gerber completed in 1949, which was found in her belongings after she died in 1954.