Tag Archive for: Quince

Capreolus – distilling the ethereal essence of the mighty quince

Golden fruit of the gods is the Hellenic sobriquet for the quince. I don’t know the Greek for knobbly but this hard fruit inevitably is that, just as its raw interior tastes tart and astringent, belying the heavenly scent from its skin. Cooking transforms it. So too distilling squeezes out something quite remarkable.

All this occupies my thoughts in a small plates bistro just off Columbia Road Flower Market in Bethnal Green as I sip a quince eau de vie made by Capreolus. Its yellow hue mirrors the mother fruit’s surface, the scent almost tropical with a lingering juicy taste unusual in a 43% spirit. It has been poured by the distillery’s founder Barney Wilzcak (who with his professional photographer hat on took the quince picture above). Barney describes it as ““possibly the most ethereal fruit we work with, astonishing in its nuance and elegance.”

Laurent Cazottes at Brawn
Barney pours a glorious sample

At Brawn I am a guest of Les Caves de Pyrene, best known as natural wine specialists but this trade tasting puts the spotlight on four other artisan drinks makers on their roster. Three have come over from France – Caroline Rozes (Armagnac Laurensan), vermouth specialist Jean-luc Carrozes (Vinmouth) and Laurent Cazottes, whose biodynamic estate in Southern France produces grapes, fruits, flowers, grains, and plants from which he fashions wines, spirits and liqueurs. A tomato liqueur was particularly astonishing. You can see why his wares can be found on Michelin restaurant digestif lists across France and beyond (you’ll find several examples at lovely Bavette Bistro in Horsforth near Leeds).  

A new organic orchard of their own for Capreolus

All Laurent’s samples taste exquisite, but I am here primarily for the fourth exhibitor, Capreolus. Seven of their eau de vies are on the (low intervention) list at Manchester’s Higher Ground – at between £9 and £16 a 25ml measure. Lunching there a fortnight before my Caves de Pyrene date I mentioned it to the restaurant’s Daniel and Ana. And – curse them! – they were just days away from a private visit to the distillery in deepest Gloucestershire. When next winter Higher Ground opens Bar Shrimp next door they are promising a special collaboration with Capreolus.

Thanks, Ana, for the promised picture of Barney on site and  his new quince tree project. In his March newsletter he had revealed that after a two and a half year search Capreolus had purchased some five acres of lowland hay meadow, where they had planted 252 quince trees, representing four varieties never grown commercially in the UK before. A big welcome then to Ispolinskaja, Turunchukskaja (both Ukrainian), Limon Ayvasi (Turkish) and Cydora Robusta (German). The trees, one year old and eight feet tall when they arrived, are interspersed with crab apple trees for diversity’s sake. It is one of the largest UK quince orchards, but the plan is to restrict yields to five tons annually, a third of a commercial crop target. 

It will plug a gap in their commitment to their own immediate terroir. At the moment this is the only fruit they buy in regularly from outside a 35 mile radius of their base at Stratton near Cirencester.

James and Susanna at Little Pomona
Their expression of quince

Foxwhelp is an awkward orchard customer but what a collab

Little Pomona Cider and Perry Mill is also outside that radius, lying 55 miles north west in Herefordshire. It’s a luminous spot that I have visited. That was just a few months before co-founder Susanna Forbes succumbed to cancer. We spent three fascinating hours in the company of her and husband James sampling their acclaimed boundary-pushing ciders and perries.

The pair came from a background in wine (James) and drinks journalism (Susanna) and across their range have not been afraid to incorporate hops, cherries and (you guessed it) quinces. Their ‘Still Life with Quince’ is an intense blend of barrel-aged cider and quince wine.

But when it came to a long-mooted collaboration with Capreolus their contribution was a single varietal cider made from an uncompromising apple called Foxwhelp. How come the evocative name? One cider apple historian attributes it to originating near a fox’s den where the cubs or whelps would play with the windfalls. Jury’s out.

Tannic and lashingly acidic, producing ciders with great ageing capacity, Foxwhelp has been around since the 17th century with its own hardcore admirers willing to pay premium prices. Susanna called it “the Riesling of the apple world”. Little Pomona have respected its qualities by barrel-ageing successive vintages in a solera system, akin to sherry making. Was this blend the base for 2022 Capreolus? I never get to ask at a crowded Brawn.

The Foxwhelp collaboration
Evocative raspberry eau de vie

I do know some of what to expect when I taste the 2022 Capreolus x Little Pomona Foxwhelp Cider Eau-de-Vie (43%) and there it is – that mind-blowing aroma of wild strawberry and blood orange typical of the cider version. That strawberry rush continues on to the palate alongside a rounded appliness, as you’d expect. The concentration is down to wild yeast fermentation of meticulously sorted low-yielding fruits, preserving up to 45kg of fruit in each finished litre. Labour intensive isn’t the half of it for Barney and his partner Hannah Morrison. There’s a small child and dog to share the adventure, which began when he abandoned his job as a conservation issues photographer to develop the distillery on his family’s land. 

His talent with words is evident too: “What enchanted me was how this elegant way of working, this capturing of pure essence, revealed so much. What I discovered was something that not only isolated a moment of peak ripeness but transported me to the parent plants and landscape in which I was raised. 

“The elevation of flavours imperceptible in the raw fruit took me to standing in 300 year old perry pear orchards. The aroma of a Blackberry Eau de Vie to the autumnal warmth of the sun. The synesthetic link of aroma and flavour is something where language consistently fails.”

It sounds idyllic but to reach this point where their spirits (including a lovely gin) can command such high prices in prestigious places has taken prodigious efforts. Still there remains an idyllic aspect to housing two copper stills in an old lean-to greenhouse. Roe deer roam this land, hence the distillery borrowing the latin name for the breed: Capreolus Capreolus. “Delicate, slipping away, this animal is a constant accompaniment to picking in the surrounding countryside, a reminder of the fleeting nature of what we are trying to preserve.” 

Barney has written an illuminating, evocative account of Capreolus for the Caves de Pyrenes blog. Do check it out.

“In 2022, with my daughter 8 weeks old and bouncing beneath a tree in the garden where we work, we touched every single fruit of 3,000,000 raspberries as fingers felt for flaws and removed every single leaf, stem and hull. In the resulting eau de vie you can smell 1,000 seeds in your glass, crushed mint and raspberry leaf, lemon zest, and yes, the perfume of the most perfect fruit enveloping you – it is as if you were stood amongst the plants themselves.”

As I sip that particular spirit in the urban sprawl of East London I feel transported to the perfumed orchards of Gloucestershire.

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Autumn is the season: quinces (the golden apples of Greek myth)

Bizarre though it may seem, when you next order a slab of membrillo to partner your Manchego at a tapas joint you are actually tapping into an English culinary wellspring that dates back to Tudor times and before.

Quince paste, which we associate with the Spanish kitchen (there’s also a French version called cotignac) was once commonplace and highly prized. Even as late as 1845 Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery is offering us a recipe for quince blancmange with almond cream.

But the quince fell out of fashion compared with its kin, the apple and the pear. Not helped by any image problem. So many varieties were merely ornamental with fruit too small to make use of. There’s one such in our garden.

Nowadays this glorious seasonal fruit is definitely undergoing a foodie resurgence.

The best place to find them affordably is a Middle-Eastern grocers. My first batch of the autumn was bought from a little shop around the corner from Levenshulme Station in Manchester. A quid each for some magnificent specimens. Yellow and downy, their scent permeated the train carriage on the way home.

Quinces are believed to have been the ‘Golden Apples’ stole from the Hesperides in the Greek myth, sacred to Venus (they are a backdrop to Venus and Mars in a section of Mantegna’s Parnassus), but it won’t be love at first bite. So resist the temptation to bite into your prized fruit, which has been picked slightly unripe; raw, it will prove hard, almost gritty and raspingly sour.

You will have to make plans for them, all of which will involve stewing of some kind or baking with sugar or honey. As it cooks it turns from yellow to a “cornelian pink’. A little will go a long way as in aromatically enhancing an apple crumble along with cloves and cinnamon, say. 

Moroccan tagines and any number of long simmered Persian lamb dishes will welcome the sweet/sour vigour a quince contributes (make sure you core and de-pip them thoroughly, though). Below is a dish I made with part of my haul – chicken with caramelised quinces from the great Claudia Roden’s Arabesque.

If this sounds on the exotic side let’s trace back to quince as the quintessentially English fruit via a historical cookbook I treasure – Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book. Published in 1986, it was a side project and obvious labour of love for Hilary Spurling, biographer of Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her husband, the playwright John Spurling inherited the original handwritten book, inscribed ‘Lady Elinor Fettiplace, 1604’. 

From this stout tome, bound in leather and stamped in gold with endpapers made from scraps of medieval Latin manuscript, Hilary extracted 200 recipes that reflect the month by month workings of the kitchen at the Fettiplace home, Appleton Manor in Oxfordshire.

Elinor calls her quince paste quince marmalade but don’t let that fool you. The word derives from Portuguese marmelada, meaning ‘quince cheese’ or ‘quince jam’). The Seville orange version was the eventual breakfast table usurper. 

Boxes of quince marmalade had been the medieval wedding present of choice and, according to Hilary, “they remained a luxury gift for anyone from royalty downwards until well into the 17th century”. They commonly came in brick shapes – shades of membrillo.

So what is Mistress Fettiplace’s timeless recipe for membrillo? It is one of 15 she provides for this fruit, twice as much as for any other. 

Take your quinces and rost them, then take the best of the meat of them & way to every pound of it, a pound of sugar & beat it together in a mortar, & boyle it till it be so thick that it com from the posnet, then mould it & print it, & dry it before the fire.

Hilary Spurling interprets it (I’m paraphrasing) as first wipe the quinces with a cloth but don’t peel. Bake them, preferably in an earthenware pot for an hour or two until they are soft but not collapsed. Cool, cut up and core. Sieve the pulp and mix with an equal weight of white sugar. A posnet is a three-footed metal cooking pot; any thick-bottomed pan will do instead. Bring slowly to boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Gently cook for a further hour or two until the mixture begins to candy and leave the pan sides. Ladle it out into patterned moulds or in a half inch layer on a flat oiled tin. Dry in a warm place until the paste is firm. Wrap in greaseproof paper for storage.

Serve with Cheddar or Stilton since we have reclaimed quince paste for England. Better still a Rachel (goat) or Berkswell (sheep) unpasteurised farmhouse cheese.

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