In the Garden
In Praise of the Misunderstood Quince
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Outside the Cloisters. More Photos »
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
Published: May 2, 2012
AFTER half a century in public life, the most famous quince trees in
New York are looking – let’s say mature. Or how about distinguished?
The Quince, Coast to Coast
No need to beat around the bush, said Deirdre Larkin, the
horticulturist who tends the four beloved quinces at the Cloisters
Museum and Gardens, along the Hudson River in Fort Tryon Park.
`They are old, and nothing will change that,’ she said. `We have a
habit of thinking when you are aged, you might as well be dead and
replaced with something new.’ Yet in Europe, where the quince’s yellow
pome is a culinary treasure, orchardists will buttress the sagging
limbs with a crutch. As fixes go, this would seem to be the equivalent
of rigging a two-legged dog with training wheels.
But, Ms. Larkin said, `trees can live for hundreds of years.’
`The period of their senescence is the longest period of their life,’
she said. `Even though I am aging – I am not going to look the way I
looked when I was 30, 40 or 50 – I’m not going to die tomorrow.’
Especially not if Ms. Larkin, who is 61, takes care of herself the way
she babies her quince trees. In recent years, she has untangled the
girdled roots and sprayed the leaves for protection against the
desiccating winds that blow in from New Jersey. And with an arborist,
Fran Reidy, she has waged a fierce campaign against another enemy, the
apple maggot, deploying a product called Tanglefoot (which sounds like
an epithet on `Dancing With the Stars’). Given such diligence, you
might think these were not just the most famous but the only quince
trees in New York. Not so. Or not quite. A handful of Hudson Valley
growers sell quince at the city’s Greenmarkets in October and
November. But after a few years of fruitless searching, you may come
to the same conclusion that I did last fall: if you want a good
quince, you’ll have to grow it yourself.
What most Americans know about quince (Cydonia oblonga) – if they know
about quince at all – is that it was once a fixture in Grandma’s
garden. O.K., Great-Great-Grandma’s garden. As long ago as 1922, the
great New York pomologist U. P. Hedrick rued that `the quince, the
`golden apple’ of the ancients, once dedicated to deities, and looked
upon as the emblem of love and happiness, for centuries the favorite
pome, is now neglected and the least esteemed of commonly cultivated
tree-fruits.’ Almost every Colonial kitchen garden had a quince
tree. But there was seldom need for two, said Joseph Postman, the
United States Department of Agriculture scientist who curates the
quince collection in Corvallis, Ore. Settlers valued quince, above
all, as a mother lode of pectin for making preserves. And for that
task, a little fruit went a long way.
`If you put the seeds in a cup of water, it becomes almost like
Jell-O,’ Mr. Postman said. This goo doubled as a pomade. (If you try
this at home, please post photos.) Like so many American workers, the
quince lost its job to a disruptive technology: powdered gelatin,
introduced by Charles Knox in the 1890s. Unemployment has been
tough. Today the nation’s entire quince crop covers a paltry 250 acres
– about the size of the lawns in Central Park. By contrast, farmers
this year will raise some 350,000 acres of apples and 96 million acres
of corn.
SO we arrive, perforce, at a fundamental question: Is raw quince
edible?
`Maybe I’m not a fair one to ask,’ Mr. Postman said. `Because I will
eat a lot of things right off the tree that my wife will turn up her
nose at.’ The skin, fuzzy at first, has `an objectionable texture,’ he
added. And when the flavor is not sour, it’s sour and
astringent. Cutting into the obdurate flesh practically takes a
katana. But then what to make of the many appetizing quince products I
recently assembled on my kitchen counter, like quince paste (what the
Spanish call membrillo), quince slices in syrup and quince butter with
almond and pinyon?
The key to enjoying quince at home, apparently, is to cook it and cook
it and cook it. At that point, the quince is ready to cook.
I also got my hands on what may be the country’s only commercial
quince liqueur and quince cider. The latter came from Eaglemount Wine
and Cider, near Port Townsend, Wash., where Trudy Davis, a vintner,
has been experimenting with about a ton of quince from the San Juan
Islands. I would pair this noncloying cider with something dry and
sharp: say, a cave-aged English Cheddar and a few episodes of Aubrey
Plaza’s deadpan on `Parks and Recreation.’
True to reputation, `quince are quite hard to work with,’ Ms. Davis
said, even with a `big commercial grinder.’
The quest for a quince that can be eaten out of the hand like its
botanical cousins, the apple and the pear, has sent Mr. Postman on
collecting trips to the tree’s ancestral homeland in the
Trans-Caucasus: Armenia and Georgia. He accessioned another store of
quince from a forsaken Soviet-era gene bank in Kara-Kala,
Turkmenistan.
Some of these cultivars, with improved cold-hardiness and
disease-resistance, are trickling into the garden world from One Green
World, a tree farm in the Willamette Valley. The nursery stocks a
Russian variety called Aromatnaya that I recently ordered, as a
bare-root sapling, to start this spring in the yard.
The quince tree is self-pollinating: you need only one. If you train
the growth to a few trunks, a quince shouldn’t get much taller than a
gardener can reach with a six-foot ladder.
Whatever the habit, there’s a case to be made for the quince as an
ornamental, and Mr. Postman gamely makes it. `Few small trees rival
the quince in becoming interestingly gnarled and twisted with age,’ he
writes in a monograph with the fitting title `The Unappreciated
Quince.’
By now, Mr. Postman has probably grown more varieties of quince than
anyone else on the continent. The Corvallis germ-plasm repository
contains 50 or 60 edible varieties, and provides material to
researchers and plant breeders. In plainer terms, Mr. Postman’s wife
calls him `a tree librarian.’
When I spoke to Mr. Postman, in fact, the couple was driving across
Arizona with a fresh quince cutting in the back seat. Mr. Postman had
just stopped at the historic Mission San José de Tumacácori, about 20
miles north of the Mexican border. Researchers there have been
replanting the neglected orchard with the forgotten fruit varieties of
17th-century Jesuit missionaries. An appetite for the quixotic seems
to go with raising quince.
`I hesitate to use this word, but it almost feels like a cult,’
Mr. Postman said. `There’s a group of dedicated quince fanciers
around, and they’re kind of spreading the word and other people are
getting interested.’
Or maybe not, he allowed.
`I tend to run in this set of fruit fanatics, so it’s hard to tell.’
TREMAINE ARKLEY, for example, began growing quince eight years ago to
take to his aunt, who remembered the fruit from the Sephardic cuisine
of her youth. He started, conservatively, with 12 trees.
Last fall, Mr. Arkley brokered eight tons of quince to restaurants,
farmers’ markets, a cidery, a distillery and presumably every other
quince nibbler within 50 leagues of his farm in Independence,
Ore. `It’s sort of my personality,’ he said. `I tend to overdo things,
that’s the honest truth. Instead of one, why not get 12?’
Mr. Arkley was due for a new obsession, anyway. In the 1980s, he took
up six-wicket croquet. (`Not backyard croquet,’ he said, `but the kind
played in the British Empire, on a putting-green surface.’) Within a
few years, he had become national champion. The 25 quince trees he
currently grows on his 1900-era farmstead stand just north of the
laser-leveled croquet lawn.
Another 125 trees, of an old French variety, belong to Earl Bruck, a
nearby orchardist. `He originally planted 1,000,’ Mr. Arkley said. But
`he didn’t know how to sell them.’
`They were rotting on the ground,’ Mr. Arkley continued. `He started
ripping the trees out. When I met him, I said: `Earl, stop! Let me see
if I can market these for you.’ ‘
Mr. Arkley is pleased to have found a good home for all that
quince. Even so, `I don’t think it will ever have a big following,’ he
said. `Just like croquet will never be a big sport.’
So why grow this disregarded fruit?
`I’ll tell you why: because everyone else grows pears and apples and
cherries and plums,’ Mr. Arkley said. `Why bother? I like to do
something offbeat. With a name like mine – where do you start? It’s a
curse: Tremaine Arkley? Come on. You go to Google `Tremaine Arkley,’
and I’m the only one in the world.’
Mr. Arkley, in other words, is a quince among quinces.
Grow It, Cook It, Treat It Right
A bushel of good quince will fetch $2.50 at farmers’ markets in New
Jersey. At least it did in the late 19th century, when the
Rev. William W. Meech published `Quince Culture,’ the definitive – and
possibly the only – guide to cultivating the fruit. (You can read it
at archive.org.)
Alas, the price of quince may have fallen since then. The problem,
quince partisans maintain, is that few of us know what to do with the
adamantine fruit. The food writer Barbara Ghazarian offers a bumper
crop of ideas in her cookbook `Simply Quince.’ There are basic
instructions here for baking, poaching, pickling and preserving
quince. A savory palate might want to try one of the more ambitious
recipes, like duck breasts with quince-sambal chutney.
As for the creamy cauliflower-quince gratin? Let’s save that until the
quince revival has taken firm root. The book ($20) is available on
Ms. Ghazarian’s Web site (queen-of-quince.com), along with a handy
coring tool she calls the Fresno Armenian Ladies’ Kitchen Widget
($12.50).
The best-tasting variety of quince remains a subject of
conjecture. Mr. Meech identified 15 varieties including an `orange’
type that he, with great reluctance, consented to call Meech’s
Prolific. It’s one of the six cultivars grown at the Willowrose Bay
orchard, in Washington, that Trudy Davis, a vintner, blends into a
fragrant hard cider (eaglemountwinery.com; a 750-milliliter bottle
costs $19, and the 2012 vintage comes out later this month).
Nine quince varieties can be found at One Green World, a Willamette
Valley nursery that specializes in uncommon fruit trees
(onegreenworld.com; $21.95 to $24.95 for a bare-root tree). The
self-professed quince fanatic Tremaine Arkley prefers the flavor of
the nursery’s Central Asian cultivars, Aromatnaya and Smyrna. Another
Northwest grower, Raintree Nursery, lists Smyrna and a couple of other
varieties for more or less the same price (raintreenursery.com).
Smyrna, by the way, is the quince with the `beautifully contorted
habit’ that Deirdre Larkin, a horticulturist, tends fastidiously at
the Cloisters Museum and Gardens. Her quince quartet in the Bonnefont
garden is healthy (repeat, these trees are not dying!). But `providing
for all contingencies,’ Ms. Larkin recently ordered some understudies
from Ty Ty Nursery, in Georgia (tytyga.com; prices start at $59.75 for
a five- or six-foot bare-root tree).
Chilly winters haven’t seemed to frighten the Smyrna quince that
Ms. Larkin keeps at her weekend house in the Catskills. As Joseph
Postman, a quince curator, noted in a recent study the United States
Department of Agriculture found that quince was `much more cold hardy
than we anticipated, particularly these varieties from Russia and
Armenia.’
A bigger problem, Mr. Postman said, may be fire blight, a bacterium
that thrives in hot, humid climates and leaves scorched-looking wood
in its wake. `Quince is notoriously susceptible,’ he said. But `New
York is not as prone as places a little farther south.’
Overhead watering fosters fire blight, as does fertilizing, which
encourages the growth of susceptible suckers. But once established,
the trees seem to do fine without such ministrations, Mr. Postman
said.
After all, if a lack of attention were fatal, the quince would be gone
by now.
Queen of Quince
831-655-4377
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/garden/in-praise-of-the-misunderstood-quince-tree.html?_r=1
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