I haven’t made much jam lately. I was very excited about the process when I was just learning about it some years ago, but I soon realized it was hardly a thrifty pursuit in my case: because I live in the city, I have no need to preserve a hypothetical glut from a garden or orchard, and the price of fresh organic fruit is such that I only buy what we’ll consume in season.

I have occasionally helped my mother prepare batches of jam while on vacation at my parent’s mountain house in the summer, when it is possible to strike good deals on crates of berries or apricots at the greenmarket. Aside from that, my jam-making ambitions have been placed on the back burner.

But then I received a big gift of quinces a few weeks ago, and in addition to the poaching and the cake baking, I was inspired to make quince jelly, one of the most classic uses of the pectin-rich fruit.

In a few months, when the jelly has had time to age a bit, we’ll pop a jar open and spread some on our morning slices of pain au levain, with or without a thin insulation layer of semi-salted butter.

I turned to jam guru Christine Ferber for guidance, and followed the recipe that’s in her comprehensive book Mes Confitures.

Making quince jelly is a two-step endeavor: first, you cook chunks of whole quinces (good news! no need to peel or core them!) in water until soft. You then filter the juice they’ve produced and, after giving it a good night’s rest, you boil it with sugar and lemon juice (the acidity makes it possible for the pectin to gel*) until the jelly is concentrated enough to set.

The amount of sugar you add in the second step depends on the volume of quince juice you get out of the first, and the different recipes I’ve looked at instruct you to add anywhere between 600 grams and 1 kilogram (3 to 5 cups) sugar for each liter (or quart) of juice.

Contrary to what one might intuitively think, this has no effect on how sweet the resulting jelly is: jelly sets on the condition that it’s been brought to a target temperature of 103-105°C (or 217-221°F; at sea level), at which point the sugar concentration is 65%**. If you’ve added less sugar in the first place, your jelly will simply take more time to reach that concentration, because there will be more liquids to boil off, and you’ll end up with a lesser quantity of jelly.

Some like to flavor quince jelly with vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon, or other warm spices, and I have no ideological objection to it, but I consulted with Maxence and we agreed we’d rather just enjoy the pure taste of quinces on our toast.

Because this is, naturally, the primary use we intend for the ruby lightbulbs of jelly my efforts yielded: in a few months, when it’s had time to age a bit, we’ll pop a jar open and spread some on our morning slices of pain au levain, with or without a thin insulation layer of semi-salted butter. I’m sure it will fare well on the tender flesh of a split yogurt scone, too, and I look forward to brushing the top of my apple tarts with it for shine, as is traditional.

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* As Harold McGee explains on page 297 of his On Food and Cooking, the addition of lemon juice “increases the acidity, wich neutralizes the electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel.” (Don’t you love to imagine those pectin chains acting all aloof and superior?)

** “When we dissolve sugar or salt in water, the boiling point of the solution becomes higher than the boiling point of pure water. This increase in the boiling point depends predictably on the amount of material dissolved: the more dissolved molecules in the water, the higher the boiling point. So the boiling point of a solution is an indicator of the concentration of the dissolved material.” Ibid., pp. 680-681.

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It’s been a bit of a mushroom fest around here lately: Maxence and I went foraging in the forest of Rambouillet earlier this month, and we came back with six and a half kilos of mushrooms between us (that’s fourteen pounds).

Naturally, we didn’t venture out willy nilly into the forest (I’ve read enough children’s tales and seen enough video projects not to do that). We went with a pro, a friend who’s a seasoned mushroom picker, who knows her Cantharellus cibarius from her Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca, and who was able to guide us to the most prolific spots and help us look for and identify the various specimens.

It was the kind of golden fall day that begs for a bundled-up picnic by a pond with ducks quacking about and, as luck would have it, that’s exactly what we got — a welcome break halfway through an intense day of scanning the forest floors for the cap of a mushroom, or the tell-tale lifted leaves under which a cep might lurk.

Maxence turned out to be really good at this game (read: better than me) and our baskets were soon heavy with lepiotas, an exceptional manna of millers, a few wood hedgehogs, the odd wood blewit, and miscellaneous boletus, including an unhoped for amount of Boletus edulis, the prized cep (a.k.a. porcino) whose meaty flesh knows no equal in the mushroom realm.

Once home, exhausted like we hadn’t been in a long time, we got to work sorting, cleaning, and prepping our bounty so the bulk of it could be cooked while fresh, which took the better part of two hours. Our reward: a young cep carpaccio and cep spaghetti for dinner, and a freezer stocked with tubs of ready-to-gobble mushrooms and mushroom broth for future meals.

And a week later, on a Friday night, I used the remainder of our ceps to make cep and walnut pizzas, the memory of which still move me as I type this.

I prepared a sourdough-leavened dough with my starter, and made the whole thing vegan by using some of the cashew “cheese” I’d made that week, in place of mozzarella. A drizzle of the fabulous olive oil they use at Delancey (thanks, M&B!) and a sprinkle of pepper and torn basil later, we feasted on delicious fall pizzas that did plenty justice to the fruits, um, spores of our foraging.

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This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s expression is, “Faire son miel de quelque chose.”

Literally translated as, “making one’s honey out of something,” it means profiting from a situation.

Example: “Elle enchaîne les déclarations provocantes, et évidemment, les journalistes en font leur miel.” “She makes one provoking statement after another, and of course, journalists make their honey out of it.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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I scored big last week, as not one, but two generous friends asked if I’d like to take a few quinces off their hands. I am systemically incapable of resisting free produce, especially when it comes from a friend’s garden (or a friend’s neighbor’s garden), and especially when it’s as old-world charming as quince. With this quince cake in mind, I said yes! yes! just tell me where and when and I’ll come a-running with my wheelbarrow!

And this is how I found myself with about five kilos of the yellow-green fruit, making my apartment smell very precisely like Maïa’s country house. Maïa was one of my sister’s childhood friends, and her grandparents owned a beautiful stone farmhouse a little way outside of Paris — geography didn’t exist outside the classroom when I was little, so I have no idea where it really was — where my sister was invited from time to time, and I got to tag along one weekend in the fall.

And this is how I found myself with about five kilos of the yellow-green fruit, making my apartment smell very precisely like Maïa’s country house.

The adults stayed in the main house, but we kids were allowed to play and sleep in the upstairs room of an outbuilding that may have been a stable at some point, and was the ideal setting in which to reenact boarding school scenes from Roald Dahl’s autobiographical book Boy.

Further in the back of the property was a large garden with numerous fruit trees, many of which were quince trees (cognassiers) and bearing big gnarly fruit when I visited. This was my first encounter with quinces, those woody not-pears covered with fuzz. I don’t think I actually tasted their flesh until many years later, but their pervasive, extraordinary smell — like a musky cross between the pear and the pineapple — was everywhere around and inside that house, and the two are forever linked in my mind’s sensory library.

Going through five kilos of quince takes some stamina, and I devoted part of my weekend to the task. The first thing I did was poach as many as would fit in my pressure cooker, following this recipe for vanilla poached quince I wrote about two years ago. This is (yet) an(other) instance when the pressure cooker is the cook’s best friend, as it slashes down the poaching time to just thirty minutes, and makes zero mess on your cooking range.

Most of these poached quince quarters will be eaten just like that, in a bowl, with a little yogurt or cream and an optional sprinkle of granola, but some were enrolled into this simple quince cake with almonds.

It is a variation on my trusted yogurt cake. I’ve tweaked it a little to add some ground almonds and fold in the diced quinces* for a lovely fall cake, fragrant and very moist, that’s best eaten with your hands, while sitting in a patch of sunlight on the wooden floors of the living room.

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* If you maintain a sourdough starter, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve replaced the yogurt with an equal weight of the starter I collect at each feeding instead of discarding it. Indeed, I have found that sourdough starter (not particularly ripe, but not super old either) can be used as a yogurt substitute in cake recipes like this one: it has more or less the same consistency and acidity, and produces a wonderfully tender crumb.

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