Wash and wipe the quinces, and take out any dark spots there may be on the skins. Cut them up without paring, cores and all; cover them with water in the preserving kettle, and boil them until they are soft enough to be rubbed through a coarse hair sieve. Then weigh equal quantities of pulp and refined sugar, and boil the mixture an hour, stirring it steadily.
Made with nice brown sugar, it is very good, though not quite as handsome. When brown sugar is used it should be stirred an hour and a half.
Put it into moulds or deep plates, and when it is cold put a paper over it, pasted at the edges, and brushed with white of egg. Marmalade can be kept for almost any length of time.
Strawberries.
Take large strawberries not extremely ripe; weigh equal quantities of fruit and best sugar; lay the fruit in a dish, and sprinkle half the sugar over it; shake the dish a little, that the sugar may touch all the fruit. Next day make a syrup of the remainder of the sugar and the juice which you can pour off from the fruit in the pan, and as it boils lay in the strawberries, and boil them gently twenty minutes or half an hour.
Another.
Weigh equal quantities of fruit and sugar, and put them together over night. The next day boil the strawberries long enough to scald without shrinking them,—six or eight minutes after they commence boiling. Then skim them out, and boil away the syrup half an hour; then pour it, hot, upon the strawberries.
Apple Jam (which will keep for years).
Weigh equal quantities of brown sugar and good sour apples. Pare and core them, and chop them fine. Make a syrup of the sugar, and clarify it very thoroughly; then add the apples, the grated peel of two or three lemons, and a few pieces of white ginger. Boil it till the apple looks clear and yellow. This resembles foreign sweetmeats. The ginger is essential to its peculiar excellence.
Pine-Apple Jam.