My hand is always high in the air when someone is offering to give away quinces.  While we have a tree, we are years away from bumper harvests.  Above you can see miss H carefully guarding last year harvest of 1.  This year we were up to 3, inelegantly dumped onto the wood heap below by a cold blast.

Despite our own quince famine, I am always on the look out for new quince recipes.  One of the simplest and truly decadent ways to eat quince is poached.  It can be a little time consuming as quince stay wooden for the longest time and then turn to mush in the blink of an eye.  The answer to this is two words - slow cooker. 

The following recipe came about when I tried to adapt Julie Le Clerc's poached quince recipe and ran out of space in our tiny slow cooker.  It turns out I like sugar.  In fact, I like more sugar than any quince recipe I've come across. If you have recently given up sugar, read no further, just look as the pictures.  The following recipe is for a 3.5l slow cooker

Yep, it's that photo again.

To make these heavenly jewels you will need the following:

3-5 Quince (limited by appetite or the size of your slow cooker)
5 cups boiling water
3 cups of sugar
1 cinnamon stick
zest and juice of 1 lemon

Peel and core the quince.  You will need a very sharp knife and pocket of patience for this step.

Pack the quince into the slow cooker

Dissolve sugar into the boiling water and pour over the quince.

Add the cinnamon, zest and juice and set to low heat for about 6 hour.

After about 2 hours, remove excess liquid from the slow cooker leaving just enough to keep the quince buoyant.  This liquid makes a fragrantly squinty cordial if you are that way inclined.

After 6 hours, test the quince with a skewer.  The quince should be dense but pierce able.  Remove the quince from the liquid to a bowl and place lid or plate over to keep in the heat.

Pour the remaining syrup, which should be dark crimson, into a pot and bring to the simmer.  Simmer and reduce for about 20 minutes until thickened.

Pour the syrup over the steaming hot quince and leave to cool.

Serve as desired - over ice cream, with yoghurt or sliced onto hot porridge.

The fruit takes on a very dense almost glace quality.  As I read a little wider, I saw that glace fruit is made by reducing the syrup and letting fruit soak it in repeatedly.  Perhaps I should have called this semi-glace quince.

If you are new to quince, consider a quince & apple crumble.  It's quince with trainer wheels and my kids will even eat it. 

This year I have preserved quince in light syrup to let us have crumble all year and tried to make quince-meat for Christmas pies. I've yet to taste the quince-meat, however the domestic goddess assures me this will be fantastic.  I'm holding out another month before I open one of the jars to test it.

If you can point me in the direction of other favorite quince recipes, I still have bucket of other peoples fruit to use up.