Advertisement
Quince
Appears in
By Abra Berens
Published 2023
Quince defines the term specialty crop for me. It is not commonly seen at the market and I’ve never seen it at a grocery store. Quince is a little finicky to use. It cannot be eaten raw (it’s too astringent to be palatable) and it requires long, slow cooking to render it from a tannic, rock-hard fruit into a sweet and yielding delight.
In the same family as pears and apples, quince originated in the rocky terrain of Western Asia—modern-day Armenia and Azerbaijan—but grows just about everywhere from as far north as Scotland to the hot plains of the Mediterranean. It is an old crop. The Romans wrote about it. Quince showed up on the supper tables of the members of the Ottoman Empire. Most of today’s quince is grown in Turkey. In the United States, I don’t know of a single farmer who grows quince at scale, though there are about 180 acres grown in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
In this section
Advertisement
Advertisement
The licensor does not allow printing of this title