Talk:Quince

Silly but serious question

As far as I can remember, I've never tasted one. Could someone give an idea of the flavor, as difficult as that can be in words? (I don't find durian terrible, but I know how hard that would be to describe) Howard C. Berkowitz 23:26, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

They are inedible uncooked. Something like a very bad version of a cooking apple -- very tart, crisp but with a pleasant aroma. I will write some more about this aspect, and two ancient recipes that I use -- one for a meat dish and the other for a dessert Martin Baldwin-Edwards 23:36, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Perhaps the local equivalent, in some respect, is the cranberry, which is generally too hard, raw, to eat. For most people, it is also too sour. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:47, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Being a good New Englander, I grew up eating quince jelly with a lot of things, the way Americans eat mint jelly with lamb, and cranberry jelly with chicken and turkey, and apple sauce with pork. It was, as I recall, widely available for sale in all grocery stores, in bottles, and was a clear dark yellow or pale brown in color, the same consistency as mint jelly (which, of course, is mint-flavored apple jelly). As the years went by it became harder and harder to find in stores -- even the redoubtable up-scale stores like Draegers in the Palo Alto area don't have it. I finally found some by "Amos", purported rustics in the Pennsylvania Dutch area, and ordered a dozen bottles over the Net. It has a pleasant, fruity taste somewhere between pear and apple, but with its own characteristics, of course. I love to eat it with corned beef hash, with a tomato-rice-Jones Sausages casserole, left-over stews that have run out of sauce, and various things of that nature, depending on my whim. I don't eat it regularly, but when I want some, I *really* want it. The Waverly Root section on it has a long disquisition on childhood tastes and the changing tastes of Westerners as sugar became more common -- which accounts, he thinks, for the Decline and Fall of the quince. Hardier peoples in earlier times would eat it raw, or maybe sweetened with honey or some such.... Hayford Peirce 23:55, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Another serious question

What on earth is a "cultivar"? Someone who cultivates, I assume, or something associated with "cultivation", but since I honestly can't believe that there are only 8 people in the great You Ess of Ay who are growing quinces, then it must mean something else. Yes, yes, I know that I can look up the word, but let's look at it this way: if *I* don't know what it means, then I think another word should be used, or that this one should be explained. Hayford Peirce 00:00, 21 March 2011 (UTC)