SC - Re: A Paste of Pippins

Elise Fleming alysk at ix.netcom.com
Mon Jan 19 05:53:22 PST 1998


Greetings.  One line of David/Cariadoc's post drew my attention:

>I am fairly sure that marmelade (which, I believe, comes from a 
>Portugese word meaning quince) meant at this time not the citrus jam 
>we now use the word for but instead meant quince paste.

I went hunting through a few cookery books and found that, indeed, most 
of the pre-1600 ones, when titled "marmelat" or some spelling variant,
used only quinces.  What was bothering me was that only yesterday I had 
run across a number of marmelades made with fruit _other_ than quinces, 
though those were in the late 1600s.  So, somewhere along the way, the 
main ingredient changed.  I did find, however, in Thomas Dawson's 1597 
_The Second Part of the Good Hus-wives Jewell_, "To make drie Marmelet 
of Peches".  So, the transformation from quince-only to other fruit was 
apparantly already underway.  From the recipe, however, this is a 
fruit-leathery-paste type of thing that can be "printed" with a mould, 
not the gloppy consistency of marmalade that we are used to.

Alys Katharine
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