"Kay Easton" wrote in message
...
In article , Franz Heymann
writes
I am also beginning to think we are talking about two different plants.
Some folk on this thread have talked about quinces as being
(1) Hard as a rock
(2) Pear shaped

The quinces of my youth could be (and were) slaughtered easily with a
Boy
Scout's knife. They were only somewhat harder than a firm apple.
They were also not pear shaped at all. More like lumpy spheres of about
8
cm diameter. The lumpiness corresponded to a typical variation in radius
from a true sphere of around +- 5 mm. The surface was woolly, but the
wool
rubbed off very easily.

The fruit had a delicious astringent-sweet-acid flavour. The jelly was a
must with lamb.

I've done some googling!

Quince - both the hedging and the fruit - seems to be popular in SA!

The following - from

http://www.agroforestry.co.uk/ansample.html

What a very interesting URL you found!
The illustration of a quince shows what I meant by the lumpy surface. On
the other hand, the ones I knew did not have the pronounced pear-like
elongation at the stalk end. I did notice that the URL was aware of this
deviation.l



suggests that they don't ripen properly in the UK, and this may be the
cause of the different views of Nick and Franz:

Quinces have long been grown for flavouring apple pies, ices and
confections. In warm temperate and tropical regions, the fruits can
become soft, juicy, and suitable for eating raw;

The quinces I knew were more than suitable for eating raw. They were
delicious fruits. However, they never became really soft. They were always
rather
harder than an apple, but it was possible, and common, to eat them simply by
biting at them.

but in cooler temperate
areas like Britain, they do not ripen so far. Here, raw quince fruits
are hard, gritty, harsh and astringent, but after a few weeks of storage
the flesh softens and astringency decreases to a point where some people
find them edible.

Franz