"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Franz Heymann wrote:


Eh? True quinces are LOW on acid! Perhaps you are thinking of
Chaenomeles (a.k.a. japonica, a.k.a. Japanese quince).

No, I am thinking of real old fashioned quinces. The orchard in my
parental
home had a number, and my school had a hedge of them. The latter served
the
additional purpose of providing the canes for chastisement. Both groupd
were intensely sour to the taste.

Boggle. None of the quince trees I have ever seen would grow well
as a hedge, or be suitable for canes. Japonica would.

Nick, I received many a hiding with a quince "cane". In fact, in Afrikaans
the common word for a "cane" is a "kweperlat", which, retranslated into
English simply becomes "quince stick". Part of the punishment routine was
that the culprit had to go and cut the damn thing. And in case you ask,
the plants really were quinces and bore quinces as fruit. They looked and
tasted precisely like the fruit called "quince" in England. And they made
quince jelly which looks and tastes exactly like the quince jelly I have
eaten in England.

In the town where my school was, we were fully familiar with "japonicas".
A "japonica" is nowhere near as robust a plant as the quince of which I
speak. Would that our school canes were obtained from japonicas.

Incidentally, the quinces of which I speak had yet another use: They made
excellent catapults.


Anyway, true quinces are NOT high-acid when ripe, which can be seen
by the fact that jelly made from them needs lemon juice to set well
(or japonica).

The setting is not to do with the acidity, but with the presence of
sufficient pectins.
I do assure you most heartily that ripe quinces are sour.

They are somewhat mouth-wrinkling, but that is not
due to acid.

Not somewhat, but considerably. And it is partly due to the acid content.

Franz