Quince marmalade

Marmalade was originally made of quinces. This was an experiment, using two quinces from a quince tree belonging to a friend.

Ingredients
2 large quinces
1 lemon
water
sugar

Equipment

knife and chopping board
saucepan
wooden spoon
sugar thermometer (optional)
three jam jars with lids

preparation time:
prepare fruit an hour to cook fruit
heat juice, peel and sugar until it jells ()

Cooking process

Don't peel the quinces. Core the quinces and cut into chunks. I found the quinces to be very tough to cut, especially in the middle. Cut the lemon into four, and squeeze out the juice. Put all this in a saucepan (except the quince cores) and cover with water. Cook for 45 mins to an hour until the quince is mush. The q uince mixture turns from white with yellow skins to an orange colour. Fish out the lemon skins and throw away (but see below).
You need to sterilise the jam jars. Wash it in fairly hot water, then fill them with hot (but not boiling) water. Glass will break if you suddenly put too hot water (or jam) in it, but the warm water helps to raise its temperature which makes it safer. Make sure the lid is immersed in hot water as well.
Add the sugar and the quince mush to the saucepan. Heat until the gelling point is reached. This is higher than the boiling point of water, so first you need to heat it until you see no more steam (which takes some time, perhaps a lot of time!) Then try dribbling a bit of the jelly onto a cold plate. Tilt the plate, or run your finger through it (careful - it might still be hot!) If wrinkles form, then it is gelling. (If you have a sugar thermometer, then the gelling point is ). The mixture goes darker as it is cooked.
Empty the jam jars of hot water and carefully pour the marmalade into the jam jars. Since the jam jar will be hot from the water, it shouldn't mind the hot marmalade. The marmalade will be hotter than boiling water, and will stick to you if you're silly enough to pour it on yourself, so be careful! I tend to do all this in the sink, so if it slops over the edge of the jar, it can easily be washed away. Now screw on the tops (remember that everything will be quite hot!).

Other ideas

Some people put circles of paper on top of the marmalade. This is to stop mould.
Year 1: I put the quince mush through the liquidiser before adding the sugar, because I was worried that bits of skin would end up in the marmalade. I don't know if this is necessary.
Year 2: The experiment repeated... This time I didn't liquidise the quince, but I did chop it into smaller chunks at the start. Also, I didn't throw the lemon peel away. The cooking had tenderised it, so I chopped the skin into small pieces, and added it back to the mix. The end result was definitely more lemony. Nice, though!
This time I forgot the lemon so used some lemon juice (in a bottle) instead. I also had orange peel left over from making an orange salad, so sliced that thin, and added it to the boiling of the quince. I think I used more sugar - 12 oz to one very large quince. The quince and peel (and water) was over a pound. (I also burnt it during the jam stage, but I feel that's optional!) This worked well.