SC - RE: Quince Pastes (long answer)

[RANDALL DIAMOND]

Allison advises:
>>>>If you buy honey in the store, you may not have to go through the
boil and skim process, but if you have bees or are getting it from a
local farmer, you want the bee-bits and excess starch out of it.  Again,
bring to a boil--very carefully--because sugar boils up and over fast and
makes a really nasty burn!  Lower heat to a low boil or less, stir
constantly until you have half the volume in the pot that you started
with<<<<
"Bee-bits".  What a concept!   But it's only a little
extra protein though.   Starch???  I'm not familiar with
where starches would come from in honey unless you
mean there may be some contaminating the honey 
through pollen in it.   For the most part, the main component
of froth when you boil honey is WAX in suspension in the 
honey.  A great deal of the golden/greenish brown beeswax
you see (rather than the pure white from combs) is reclaimed
from the skim in large scale production.  It takes quite a while
to get it all out by boiling though.  The wax in the froth will flash 
vaporize if it spills on your burner and burns with a nasty black 
carbon smoke.  Boilng honey is more dangerous than boiling
sugars because of the greater volitility of the wax in the froth.

Akim Yaroslavich
"No glory comes without pain"