Dulce de membrillo

Before we went out to Broadway yesterday R and I cooked the quince paste, and then left it drying out in the slowest of slow ovens. This is one of those processes - like finding the setting point of jam - that always causes me huge stress, because there's no infallible test that tells you when the thing is done. It is important though, because the dryer the paste is, the longer you can keep it in the fridge. This being quite a thick slab, I happily left it to its own devices for a couple of hours, then when we got home we inverted it onto a baking tray and gave it another 90 minutes. Then it just sat in the oven while they both cooled down.

This morning I trimmed the sides, which had gone a little chewy in the oven, cut the remaining slab into smaller pieces, and wrapped these individually in baking parchment and foil before boxing and refrigerating them. Mentally scoring another line through my festive to-do list, I made myself a mug of tea and set off to do something more interesting - only to remember that the poaching liquor from the quinces was still sitting in a jug in the fridge, waiting to be made into quince jelly. I reacted to this realisation like the Boy Wonder going off on one - "IT'S NOT FAIR! EIVER! IT'S NOT FAIR EIVER AT ALL!!", but the liquor is too good to waste, so I set Elijah playing on R's portable speaker, then buckled down and made the jelly while singing along loudly and inaccurately to the choruses.

Did I mention that finding the setting point of jam is stressful? Quince jelly is worse, because it's less forgiving. Jam is generally acceptable across a spectrum from quite runny to quite firm and the cooking process usually takes a while, during which you have multiple chances to decide where it's got to on the spectrum and whether or not to take it further; but quince jelly cooks very fast, and the interface between not-set and rock hard is wafer thin. The last time I made some it set so hard that it was almost impossible to extract from the jar, so today I tried to err on the side of caution. I boiled it for just a few minutes at a time, resting and testing after each boiling, and decreed it done as soon as a drip set on the edge of the spoon. It's still too early to say whether it will need to be served with a ladle or a cold chisel, but I'm sure the family jam taster will let me know, when he applies some to his toast in the morning.