Delicious mixed with pasta, stirred into a plain risotto at the end of cooking, topping a bowl of summer minestrone soup, or layered inside a lasagne with ricotta. It keeps for a week in the fridge in a jar covered with a layer of olive oil. Or freeze it in little plastic tubs. I always have some ready to defrost quickly for an easy pasta ‘n’ pesto dinner – so much nicer than the pasteurised shop-bought jars.
A delicious alternative to lemon curd – for toast, scones, tarts, berries, meringues or whatever you fancy. This recipe is based on one by Marguerite Patten. It uses more sugar than more ‘modern’ recipes, but this means it will last several months as opposed to several weeks. I don’t enjoy agonising over whether to eat something possibly past its safety limit, so prefer to use the extra sugar. And it tastes great.
Aka quince cheese, membrillate (Spanish), cotognato (Italian), pate de coings (French) and marmelata (Portuguese), this has to be one of my favourite things to do with quinces. It is the classic accompaniment for manchego cheese, but also very good with aged cheddar.
The trick is to avoid graininess, a common flaw. Quinces have tiny rock-hard grains in their cores, which will pass through just about any sieve. Most recipes tell you to cook whole quinces then blitz and sieve the lot, but this results in grainy membrillo. So remove the cores before or after boiling the quinces. I prefer after, as a) cutting cores out of raw, hard quinces is tricky, and one of these days I will slice right into my hand, and b) the cores and pips help add colour and pectin, so better to leave them in until just before you sieve.
The other tip is to add some acidity in the form of lemon juice or tartaric acid, to balance all that sweetness.
Lacto-fermenting is another way of pickling. Instead of using vinegar, you use a salt solution and wait for some special (naturally existing) bacteria to work their magic. The gherkins retain more of their vitamins and there are other health benefits too. More importantly, they don’t have that overpowering vinegary tang and taste delicious.
Here’s the science bit: The salt solution favours the proliferation of lactic acid bacteria. These bacteria (of which there are many species) ferment carbohydrates into lactic acid, carbon dioxide and other organic acids without the need for oxygen. This turns the solution acidic and replaces the air at the top of the jar with carbon dioxide gas. So, other (unwanted) bacteria will now not be able to reproduce.
American recipe books will contain warnings, or not include this method of preserving at all. But this kind of fermentation has been used across the world for centuries. We came across plenty of food preserved this way on our culinary travels in 2008: In Poland we loved the big barrels of gherkins and cabbage (ie sauerkraut); in Turkey we ate and drank yoghurt with everything we could; in Morocco our chicken tagines came with preserved lemons; in Mali we drank lots of millet beer; and in Ghana we filled up on fufu (fermented cassava and unripe plantain, pounded to a sticky stodge).
Of course, you could use whole quinces for this, but it works just fine with skins and cores left over from other quince recipes, a tip I picked up from our jam-making friend Eduard Dumitrescu in Romania. (After all, that’s where all the pectin is.) In fact, our jam and jelly discussions with Eduard and his wife Anca lasted long into the night, as we traced the etymology of Romanian’s many words for ‘jam’…
This is a standard jelly recipe, so you could use cooking or crab apples instead, or half apples and half hedgerow berries – rowans, rosehips, sloes, blackberries, elderberries and haws all work well. It helps to squish the simmering fruit with a potato masher once or twice, to ensure all the flavour comes out. You can also flavour such jellies with a little spice or herb, by adding these to the simmering fruit at the first stage.
The secret to a good quince jelly, I think, is to simmer the fruit a long time so it reaches a beautiful pink colour. Like crab apples, quinces turn pink as they cook, but they take a lot longer to do so. Your jelly will be delicious with roast pork, lamb or duck, or just on toast or rice pudding.
Here’s an unusual alternative for using up a butternut squash or two. Or you could use pumpkin. We first enjoyed kabak tatlısı in Istanbul as a dainty dessert at Musa Dağdeviren’s wonderful Çiya restaurant. After that we spotted it in various places as we travelled around Turkey and had the good fortune to learn how to make it from both Zeliha İrez, at her lovely guesthouse, and Engin Akin, a food writer and cooking teacher. This recipe follows their tried-and-tested method. You will need to do some maths; the candying stage follows a ratio of 2:3:4 of squash:sugar:water. I use a large copper preserving pan, but any really big, wide saucepan will do. It’s really good and I dare you to try it!
The use of calcium hydroxide, also known as ‘pickling lime’, ‘hydrated lime’ and ‘slaked lime’, is optional. It will work just fine without it; simply miss out step 2. But if you can find it, do use it, as its effect is remarkable. 
Somehow (and I’d really like to know how) it causes the pieces of squash to develop a firm, almost crunchy skin, so that when you bite into a piece you will experience the marvelous texture combination of the crystalline exterior and soft gooey insides. Plus, it helps the squash keep its shape while cooking for so long. Calcium hydroxide is used for similar purposes in Indian cookery, so you can find it in good Indian food shops. It comes as a white paste. I got mine from www.spicesofindia.co.uk. Their little green tubs of ‘chuna edible lime’ hold approximately 4 tablespoons each and cost just 75p. (I’m trying to ignore the fact they’re labelled ‘for external use only’.)
Kabak tatlısı belongs to a fascinating family of sweet preserves, including rose petal, aubergine, fig, tomato and green walnut, which we found in Romania, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. During our travels in these countries we became slightly obsessed with these beautiful ‘spoon sweets’ and spent a good deal of time trying to uncover their origins. You can read about what we found out here.
Here’s an unusual alternative for using up a butternut squash or two. Or you could use pumpkin. We first enjoyed kabak tatlısı in Istanbul as a dainty dessert at Musa Dağdeviren’s wonderful Çiya restaurant. After that we spotted it in various places as we travelled around Turkey and had the good fortune to learn how to make it from both Zeliha İrez, at her lovely guesthouse, and Engin Akin, a food writer and cooking teacher. This recipe follows their tried-and-tested method. You will need to do some maths; the candying stage follows a ratio of 2:3:4 of squash:sugar:water. I use a large copper preserving pan, but any really big, wide saucepan will do. It’s really good and I dare you to try it!
The use of calcium hydroxide, also known as ‘pickling lime’, ‘hydrated lime’ and ‘slaked lime’, is optional. It will work just fine without it; simply miss out step 2. But if you can find it, do use it, as its effect is remarkable. Somehow (and I’d really like to know how) it causes the pieces of squash to develop a firm, almost crunchy skin, so that when you bite into a piece you will experience the marvelous texture combination of the crystalline exterior and soft gooey insides. Plus, it helps the squash keep its shape while cooking for so long. Calcium hydroxide is used for similar purposes in Indian cookery, so you can find it in good Indian food shops. It comes as a white paste. I got mine from www.spicesofindia.co.uk. Their little green tubs of ‘chuna edible lime’ hold approximately 4 tablespoons each and cost just 75p. (I’m trying to ignore the fact they’re labelled ‘for external use only’.)
Kabak tatlısı belongs to a fascinating family of sweet preserves, including rose petal, aubergine, fig, tomato and green walnut, which we found in Romania, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. During our travels in these countries we became slightly obsessed with these beautiful ‘spoon sweets’ and spent a good deal of time trying to uncover their origins. You can read about what we found out here.
To make up for the absence of recipes this last month, here is a
citrussy pair suited to the season, complete with nerdy citrussy facts.
I think preserving oranges and lemons is fun. You might not, of
course. (The lemons are for Anthea, who assures me she’s interested.)
It’s really easy to preserve your own lemons, and once you have a jar of them you’ll find yourself adding them to tagines (eg chicken with lemon and olives), salsas (with shallots and fresh herbs, to go on grilled fish or meat), salads and couscous dishes…
When I was 4, my dad gave my mother ‘The Times Cookery Book’ by Katie Stewart for Christmas, doubtlessly not for entirely altruistic reasons. She’s been making Katie’s marmalade every January since. The house being filled with the sweet-sour aromas of Seville oranges cooking in their own syrup is a favourite childhood memory. Mum’s excellent 2008 vintage prompted me to write it up, complete with her own and Katie’s tips.
So, we are STILL in the UK, waiting for our new car (it’s a red one, and actually quite old) to be fixed up. We still have a few essentials to buy (plug adaptors, espresso cups, etc), but hopefully next week’s email will come from Paris…
Many thanks to those who have sent us tips for where to go and other
useful contacts for our travels. Please keep them coming.
Well, a lot has happened in 3 weeks. We enjoyed a traditional American Thanksgiving chez Alex and Nicole, which, despite Alex nearly knocking Nicole out with a plate of oysters, the dog yaffling a whole triple-creme cheese off the board during the commotion, and later getting to the turkey before we did, was a most enjoyable feast. I finished my internship at Chez Panisse, which was a little traumatic – involving much sobbing followed by several medicinal Manhattans. I learnt so much there, loved cooking in a professional kitchen every day, met some wonderful people and properly fell in love with the place. And, somewhere in between these incidents, I candied a new batch of citrus peels, sourced some suet and had several restaurant mates around for a mammoth Christmas cake and pudding making session, at which a round of eggnog was the only American concession.
I realise Stir-up Sunday has passed, but it’s not too late to make Christmas cake and pudding (should you be so inclined, and probably British). Although, I recommend keeping the pudding til Xmas ’08, as
the one-year-old pud we ate at the pudding party was even more delicious
than its sibling which we ate in April.
So, here is your first Christmassy recipe – candied citrus peel. The cake, pudding and eggnog will follow shortly.