The Memory-Invoking Power of Quince
A journey into the edible past
by Guy Hand
I hesitate to invoke the famous Marcel Proust time-travel tale one
more time, since uncountable references to that story have ricocheted
across food literature like pepper-spraying cops across the
Internet. But for those whose reading habits haven't myopically
focused on food and culture, I'll briefly recap:
In the novel Remembrance of Things Past by French writer Proust, the
narrator had an absentminded taste of "one of those squat, plump
little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they
had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell," which
teleported him back to his long-forgotten childhood. Proust explores
this food-induced teleportation for nearly 1.5 million words,
examining what he called the "involuntary memories" invoked by
something as seemingly innocuous as a scalloped cookie.
Boisean Dave Turner knows all about taste and memory, if not Marcel
Proust and his madeleines. The catalyst that shot Turner into his past
was quince, a fragrant apple-like fruit.
"Somewhere when I was between 6 and 10, my grandmother used to make
this quince jelly," the 60-year-old Turner said as he opened a gate
and walked me into his suburban back yard. "I never knew what a quince
was, all I knew was it was the most marvelous-tasting jelly I ever
had."
With an aromatic, apple-pear-citrus flavor, the quince was prized by
Puritan settlers who brought it to America in 1629. The quince thrived
in colonial communities and eventually spread across the country--even
to Mountain Home, where Turner's grandmother made her memorable jelly
in the '50s.
As Turner grew older, though, he forgot about quince. Like most of us,
life piled up on top of his childhood memories, and for a quarter
century, quince never entered his mind. Then that forgotten taste
resurfaced. Sometime in his 30s, Turner quietly began obsessing over
his grandmother's quince jelly.
"I was kind of thinking back on how wonderful that jelly was," he said
with a fond, far-off gaze that made this graying Idaho native suddenly
seem 6 again. "I looked around but you couldn't buy it. Nobody even
knew what it was."
In America's early days, everyone knew what quince was. The fruit was
more popular than the apple, according to author Barbara Ghazarian in
her recent book Simply Quince.
"Within a century, however," she wrote, "the apple snatched the
spotlight and the popularity of quince steadily declined."
Although delicious when cooked, the quince can't compete with an apple
plucked fresh from a tree. With the first bite of raw quince comes
promise: a satisfying crunch followed by a burst of flavor. But almost
instantly that bright rush is sucked away by a cotton-like astringency
that fades into the flavorless finish of moist cardboard. Despite the
limited charms of raw quince, the fruit was prized as a potent source
of pectin, which is used to set and thicken all kinds of fruit jams
and jellies. But that attribute was made irrelevant when mid-20th
century scientists developed artificial pectin and quince was quickly
tossed into America's forgotten-fruit bin. Although Turner's memory
of quince had returned by the 1980s, he couldn't find anyone who sold
the fruit, the trees or even knew what he was talking about. "I
started hunting around the Treasure Valley, calling different
nurseries looking for a quince tree. And they pretty much thought I
was nuts," he said.
None of the nurseries he talked to had heard of culinary quince, just
the ornamental, flowering quince bushes that weren't even a member of
the same genus. But not everyone in Idaho had quince amnesia.
Quince has long played a prominent role in Basque cuisine, having
arrived in the Basque provinces of Europe in the 15th century. Quince
is still prepared in the Basque Country in both sweet and savory
dishes, but most typically in the form of membrillo--a firm,
rose-colored quince paste that, in its most traditional paring, gives
a sweet, floral counterpoint to sharp Basque sheep milk cheeses like
idiazabal and manchego.
Basque immigrants Luisa Bilbao and Carmen Lete also used quince to
stir up memories of the past. The pair had little trouble recognizing
quince trees
when they arrived in Idaho in 1956 and 1957, respectively. On a
recent November day, Lete showed a couple of younger Basques how to
make membrillo. She has been making quince paste in Idaho since at
least the mid-'60s, back when she was cooking for a sheep camp in
Marsing.
"I don't know where I got the quince," she said, with a Basque lilt as
she stirred a bowl of near-molten quince puree. "That's too long to
remember."
To this day, Lete and Bilbao make numerous trays of membrillo every
fall from quince they gather from Basque friends who have nurtured
backyard trees through the years.
But back in the '80s, Turner wasn't lucky enough to have friends with
quince trees. He futilely searched local nurseries for two years
without finding a single quince. Then one day, Greenhurst Nursery in
Nampa called with good news: They'd found Turner some trees.
"So I took the afternoon off and I ripped over there and I bought two
trees," Turner said.
Twenty-five years later, Turner showed me how those specimens had
grown into a pair of handsome shade trees, full of ripening,
greenish-gold fruit. The trees laced the air with a delicate,
ineffable scent--pear, lemon, honey and nutmeg--a scent I found hard
to pin down, but one easy to imagine haunting Turner's memory.
Anyone might mistake those trees for apple trees, except for the fact
that the large, lumpy fruit was covered in both wax and an unruly
white fuzz, like lint on an old sweater.
"The fuzz protects them," said Turner, as if defending a friend's bad
hair day. "If you remove the fuzz, they oxidize very quickly."
That pubescence, as horticulturalists call it, is also thought to
repel pests. "They're not really plagued by worms; you don't have to
spray them," Turner said. Nor do squirrels or birds seem to covet
quince.
Some biblical scholars suggest the quince was the Garden of Eden's
true forbidden fruit. After all, quince was first cultivated in
Mesopotamia. Homer and Virgil later waxed poetic about the virtues of
quince. Other Greeks and Romans used quince to avert the evil eye or
make air fresheners.
Many of the world's cultures never forgot about quince. In Simply
Quince, Ghazarian wrote that the fruit is called "marmelo" in
Portuguese, "coing" in French, "quitte" in German, "ayva" in Turkish
and "sergevil" in Armenia. "Across the globe, the fruit-bearing quince
tree (Cydonia oblonga) is cultivated and prized for its versatility in
the kitchen."
To prove that versatility, Ghazarian offers recipes for poached
quince, baked quince, quince seed tea, quince pickles, curried quince
with lamb, bay scallops and shrimp with quince, and for dessert,
quince compotes, buckles, crisps and crumbles.
With limitless culinary possibilities, and trees that telegraph their
intriguing scent every fall, Dave Turner said he has no trouble
turning friends and neighbors into quince fans.
"There are some people that are so in love with quince, I get phone
calls and they say, 'Are they ready yet?'" Turner said as he rolled a
ripe quince between his hands. "They're hooked on them, like I am."
Turner gives away fruit, ships boxes to friends in places as far away
as Ohio, and sells a good amount at Boise Co-op. But did his long
quest for quince give him that Proustian madeleine-moment he was
looking for, his own edible path to the past?
"It took four or five years before they started producing fruit," he
said of the trees we stood beneath. "But once I got fruit off of it
and made this jelly using Grandma's recipe ... the flavor come right
back. It just took me way back to when I was 6 or 7 years old."
http://www.boiseweek...ent?oid=2558036
The Memory-Invoking Power of Quince
Started by
Yervant1
, Dec 08 2011 01:16 PM
3 replies to this topic
#1
Posted 08 December 2011 - 01:16 PM
I love raw quince!
#2
Posted 23 June 2013 - 10:32 PM
#3
Posted 23 June 2013 - 10:37 PM
- MosJan likes this
#4
Posted 24 June 2013 - 11:21 AM
Good find Thanks
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