My Father-In-Law & the Infamous Quince Jelly Episode

I've been thinking a lot about my father-in-law, Herb, who passed away quite suddenly last week. Now that the shock is wearing off just a little, and the fog is starting to lift from our collective family consciousness, a flood of great memories keeps coming to me. Given my long-standing love affair with creating unusual preserves, it might not be surprising to know that one of my favorite memories of my father-in-law has to do with - what else? - making jelly for him.

Herb Rubin

It all started when my in-laws retired and moved from Upstate New York to a home in a neighboring town here in Colorado so we could all be closer. Herb discovered that, among other things, the yard of their new home contained a quince tree. He was very excited when that tree produced fruit and asked if I could make jelly from that fruit.

I'd never made quince jelly before. I didn't even know what a quince was and I'd never actually seen the fruit before. But I was, and still am, always up for a challenge, so I happily picked up the culinary gauntlet Herb had thrown. I headed to the Internet to do some research and it wasn't long before I'd found what seemed to be a suitable recipe.

It called for 3 pound of quince and I relayed my needs to my father-in-law, who quickly obliged by bringing over a sack of small, yellow fruit with a shape similar to a misshapen pear. When weighed, it would take 20 of these pieces of fruit to make the 3 pounds I needed. The recipe called for rubbing the fruit with a towel to remove the fuzz, cutting the fruit in half, using a melon baller to remove the seeds and cores and bundling those seeds and cores into a piece of cheesecloth to boil out the natural pectin. Why I didn't just use a box of pectin is a story for another day.

What you should know about quince, and what I quickly learned, is that they are hard. Ridiculously hard. Mahogany hard! But I was determined to make this happen. By the time I was done preparing the fruit, my hands were bleeding and I had blisters that would take weeks to heal. But I'd done it. I made that jelly, and it was pretty darned tasty. Herb was so proud to have something made from fruit he'd picked off his very own tree.

Two weeks later, as I did some grocery shopping, I stopped in my tracks. There, in the middle of the produce section, was a lovely display of GIGANTIC quince. At least I thought they were gigantic. They were actually normal sized fruit and I would only have needed to process 5 of them to the 20 from my father-in-law. Turns out, those quince Herb gave me were the smallest, saddest quince ever to be turned into jelly and if either of us had had a clue what a quince should look like, or how many should make up a pound, I wouldn't be sharing this story with you now.

We both laughed pretty hard when I told him about it, and he never asked me to make jelly from his quince tree again.