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Quince cheese
Found in: Iranian cuisine
Quince cheese is a sweet, thick, quince jelly or quince candy.
The recipe is probably of ancient origin, the Roman cookbook of Apicius, a collection of Roman cookery recipes, compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century AD, gives recipes for stewing quince with honey.
Quince cheese is prepared with quince fruits. The fruit is cooked with sugar, and turns red after a long cooking time and becomes a relatively firm, quince tart. The taste is sweet but slightly astringent.
In the French cuisine quince paste or Pate de coing is part of the Provence Christmas traditions and part of the Thirteen desserts which are the traditional dessert foods used in celebrating Christmas in the French region of Provence.
In Hungary a similar quince cheese is called birsalma sajt.
In Pakistan quinces are stewed together with sugar until they turn bright red. The resulting stewed quince, called Muraba is then preserved in jars.
In Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay the membrillo, as the quince is called in Spanish, is cooked into a reddish jello-like block or firm reddish paste known as dulce de membrillo.
The quince fruit
The quince is a hard, golden coloured fruit. The fruit was known to the Akkadians, who called it supurgillu. The quince is probably of Middle Eastern origin, in Arabic safarjal. The small quince tree or bush is native to Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, but is grown even in Hungary, Romania, Albania, Republic of Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria.
Most varieties of quince fruits are too hard, astringent and sour to be consumed, unless prepared.
See also
Dulce de membrillo
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Quince cheese