Ingredients (serves 4 people):
- 5 quinces;
- a glass of almond milk (you know the drill);
- a litre of beef stock;
- 30 grams of butter;
- a pinch of sugar;
- a pinch of ginger;
- powdered cinnamon.
Recipe:
Peel the quinces and mince them in cubes after removing the core. Place the pieces in a pan and cover with the almond milk, the butter, the sugar and the ginger. Cook it on a low fire until the liquid has shrunk, then mush it to a pulp and place it in a pan with the broth. Cook for 20 minutes more on a slightly more live fire. When you place it in the serving bowls, sprinkle each portion with cinnamon.
Quinces?
Quinces are not apples and I strongly suggest not to swap them in this recipe, unless you want to make a dessert.
As a symbol sacred to Aphrodite, a quince possibly played a role in a lost poem by Callimachus that has been preserved in a prose epitome. In this tale, Acontius, upon spotting his beloved in the temple courtyard of Aphrodite, plucks a quince from the sacred orchard. He then inscribes a message on its skin and discreetly rolls it at the feet of the illiterate nurse accompanying the girl. Intrigued by the gesture, the nurse hands the quince to the girl, who, upon reading the inscription aloud, unwittingly utters a solemn vow to marry Acontius, swearing by Aphrodite herself. Such vows spoken within the goddess’s sacred precinct are considered unbreakable. We do not know how the story ends, but Acontius is a real asshole.
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, refers to “numerous varieties” of quince and provides descriptions of four of them.
In the Akkadian language, the fruit was identified as “supurgillu,” referred to collectively as “quinces”. This term was adopted into Aramaic as “sparglin”. During the Mishnaic Hebrew era in Judea, it was known as “prishin”, a borrowing term from Jewish Palestinian Aramaic meaning “the miraculous [fruit].” Quince thrived in the warmth of the Mesopotamian plain, an environment where apples did not flourish, and some in ancient times even dubbed this fruit “golden apples.” Modern scholars speculate they might be the famed fruit in the Hesperides garden.
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