Cornered by the coings....*

I feel like all of my leisure time has been taken over by quinces: yesterday I started putting up jars of liqueur in preparation for the holidays, tonight I start in on the jellies. In the meantime, our enormous bushel has only had the top few quinces shaved off of it. I can feel it watching me from a corner of our kitchen, tapping its fingers reproachfully.

Or maybe I'm going mad up here in the mountains.

Working my way through that bushel brings home what harvest must have felt like before the convenience of our modern marketplaces: when you try to eat seasonally and locally, you are at the mercy of what is available. All of a sudden, the ways that we, as modern consumers, are driven by our whims, tastes and desires, seems skeletally bare. How ego-driven our tastes are! And how arrogant.

What the pre-modern laborer did not have, which I do have, is electricity and a food processor and that was what got me through preparing the eight quart jars of liqueur de coings that I now have infusing in my pantry. (Two posts from the French food blogger A Vos Tabliers! on preparing quince liqueur here and here.)

I took inspiration from a recipe on liketocook.com, but I departed from it a bit in reducing the amount of sugar that I used. As we have learned from sad and happy experience, sugar can be added later, as simple syrup. Add it too early and you risk obscuring the fruit's essence.

Quince liqueur (Part One)

Lots of quince
Even more vodka
Sugar

Quarter the quince and remove the seeds; slice the fruit so that you can feed it into a food processor; process the fruit with the shredding or grating blade; to each quart jar add 2 cups of shredded quince, 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 cups of vodka; shake the jars well to dissolve the sugar as much as possible; put the jars in a cool, dark place; shake them once a day for the first week; leave to infuse for one month. To be continued....

In other news, I bought us a non-electric Rosle food mill to help with the jelly making. It's expensive! So it better last the lifetime it's promising to.

* -- where coings means quinces, en Francais. (But also where "coins" means corners.) Get it? Ugh, I think I've inherited the French propensity for puns. Horrible.