The Berlin Files: The Accidental Quince
Bite with caution
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How many of you are familiar with quince? My exposure to it comes primarily from Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat:
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon
I vaguely knew it was something that grew on trees and that was often paired with cheese. Beyond that, I didn’t even know what it looked like. Or what it tasted of.
Raise your hand if you too have personally been victimised by quince.
This story took place a couple of weeks ago, after the happy discovery of an absolutely stunning supermarket selling fresh produce just down our street. When we were searching for a flat, my only criteria was: high ceilings, second floor or above, natural light. But there are of course other, secret, hopes that everyone has for where they live that wouldn’t be rational enough to turn down a perfectly good place. Quiet neighbours, great cafes, wooden floors etc. One of mine was: somewhere very nearby that sells really good quality food. The kind of place you go to as a treat, not for your weekly shop. And I got very lucky, because this supermarket is so goddamn fancy there are things in there I’ve never seen before. A mound of truffles behind a locked display case, their outsides brown and furred like weird, knobbly potatoes. Fat, glistening slices of ropey octopus (scary) and several shelves containing elegant, slender bottles of balsamic vinegars at €60 apiece. There is a special refrigerated room - yes, an entire room - for select fruits and vegetables.
My partner and I are tourists in this supermarket, one of those middle class families who gawk loudly at the selection at the buffet table, or get excited by the amenity kits on airplanes. We can afford to be there, but only on special occasions. And on one such occasion (simply, a Thursday) we stopped by for some fresh fruit. You have to understand, I grew up eating fruit from three countries: England - where I lived - and Brazil and Montenegro, where my parents come from. That means I have spent a lifetime comparing the (subpar, bland) fruits of England to the (sweet as fuck, delicious) fruits of the Mediterranean and South America. I have tasted the very best of watermelons, peaches, nectarines, mangoes, guavas, pineapples, papayas, avocados, lychees, dragonfruits, oranges, bananas, cherries, grapes, apricots and pomegranates as part of the who am I and where is home? ritual of the second generation immigrant kid. All the diaspora children write about mangoes. So you have to understand that good quality fruit is more than just a luxury to me, it’s the literal taste of nostalgia, and that is very appealing to a writer and perpetual yearner. So this supermarket isn’t just a supermarket, yes? At this special place, I pressed a mango to my nose to check its ripeness and was immediately transported to Brazil, sniffing the mangos dripping off the trees on my cousin’s farm. I told you we are all obsessed with mangoes.
In our basket that day we placed half a papaya, a very soft mango, two plums, two nectarines, a punnet of strawberries and….a quitte. That’s what the sign on the wooden palette said: quitte. It was very full - more so than its neighbouring palettes of pear and pomegranate. Maybe I should have picked up on that, but I didn’t. Maybe, I should have remembered that I am in Germany and so all the fruit is of course labelled in German, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have google translated it, but I felt whimsical and overly-confident from our fruitful plunder, and so I merely added it to the basket. It was to be an adventure of the palette. I was smug.
“What is that?” My partner asked suspiciously. He has seen me get overly-excited by rows of fruit before, he knows I can sometimes take it too far. I told him I wasn’t sure - it must be some local German delicacy. And we should try it, because we live here now and we must take on the flavours of the land, must we not? “A cross between an apple and a pear, I bet.”
We bought it, it lived in our fruit bowl for a couple of days. Then, on a Sunday night, I decided it was time to grace my mouth with this exciting new discovery. My first mistake: I did not google what it was or how to eat it. I washed the quitte and cut it open on the chopping board. More like hacked at it, to be honest. It was extremely tough, and I didn’t even question it. My second mistake. I picked up a quarter and bit into it before I’d even finished cutting the rest, eager to try it. It was, to be blunt, horrendous. The fruit was hard and astringent, and turned weirdly chalky in my mouth. Apparently this is due to ‘the tannins’, whatever those are. I almost never spit out food, but I spat this one out into my hand after a few seconds - it was inedible. Obviously, I immediately then tried to get my partner to try it. He took one look at my face and immediately declined, leaving me alone in my culinary nightmare. It was at this point that I turned, despairingly, to the internet.
Two things happened at once: I learnt that ‘quitte’ or ‘quietten’ is German for quince, and AI informed me that “even when fully ripe, quince fruit is completely inedible raw.” My research assistant (google) also informed me that quince used to be very common in German orchards but are now less common. Quince paste (also known as membrillo) is apparently very popular here? According to one baking blog, it’s typically cut into diamond shapes and rolled in sugar. As a result, people often buy unripe quince to let it mature at home.
I’m going to say something potentially controversial here. Any fruit that needs to be cooked for consumption is, in my opinion, not fruit. It is, at best, a vegetable. I did look at the dictionary definitions and what I found did not support my statement here, so I disregarded it. But let me just reiterate, if I have to cook it, it’s not fucking fruit.
Anyway, I learnt that in order for quince to be considered edible it needs to be cooked (!) for 40-50 minutes. I don’t like wasting food, so I dragged a pan onto the hob and stuck the yellowy flesh into boiling water for three quarters of an hour whilst I watched an episode of Severance. You know when the quince is ready when it softens and turns the water pink. By the time it was done it was like, 11pm, and I no longer felt adventurous. So I took it out of the water and let it become Monday’s problem. I did not, at the time, realise I was going to write about this, so I didn’t document anything very well. But here’s what it looked like post-boil. Hard to present this aesthetically.
The cooking instructions said to save the water because you can use it to make paste or jam. That’s a hard pass, tbh. It was also a troubling consistency - a little too thick - and made me feel uneasy. I was tempted to sip it but I’m a nostalgic little coward.
I did try the cooked quince though. The internet gave me various suggestions of what it might taste like - from honey, to an apple-pear hybrid to citrusy. I can sort of see where most of those descriptions came from - it is honeyed in taste, but like very old, stale honey. It’s vaguely pear-like. But above all, it tastes cooked. The same way that a cooked apple or whatever goes mushy and pungent, a textural experience that is both upsetting and unnerving. If it wasn’t abundantly clear by now, I think cooked fruit is Not Okay (Unless It’s Banana Bread). I did not enjoy it. I did not finish it. The quince humbled me, I guess. It only cost two euros and a mouthful of bitter chalk.
Are there lessons to be learnt? Yes in the sense of buy food more mindfully. No in the sense of, small surprises are kind of great, even when they’re not. I think we’re all in agreement that fruit should not be hot, or even lukewarm.
See you next time for a post about why I would never survive as an anarchist.
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