Quince cheese: a salutary tale
or How not to test historic recipes
1. When checking out different recipes for quince cheese, do not forget to make especial note that most of them result in a hot splattery mass at a crucial stage of the process.
2. When that exceedingly hot mixture does an exceedingly good job at searing your right hand, do not forget to turn the electricity off before starting first aid.
If you have successfully failed at both steps one and two (as I did when cooking quince cheese under the influence of a low grade infection), the quince cheese may well have caramelised a bit. Mine did. I had a little layer of quince toffee at the bottom of the pan. It hurt to stir and the mixture was at least three minutes from being ready, so I gave up on quince cheese and a couple of friends have been the fortunate recipients of toffee-flavoured quince sauce.
My first aid looks as if it worked - I should get full use of my hand back tomorrow (all those dishes to wash!!) but I have learned my lesson about cooking certain types of dishes while running a fever.
If anyone wants to test the sequence of events themselves (the quince sauce turned out rather delicious, after all) I can provide a recipe. it won’t be the actual ingredients I used, because I was curious about the effects of raw sugar on quince, but it’s a place to start. And you already know all the things not to do.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
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