Toasted baguette slices on a wooden board, each topped with a thin triangle of pale Manchego and a glossy garnet slice of quince paste, a halved yellow quince beside them

Membrillo and Manchego Toasts, With Quince Paste Made at Home

Straight off the tree, a quince is hard, wears a faint gray fuzz and is astringent enough to dry the tongue, which is why quinces are mostly cooked or preserved before anyone eats them. Two slow hours in a wide pot with lemon and the weight of their purée in sugar turn them into membrillo, a dense paste that slices cleanly and tastes of honey and pear, with something floral underneath. It wants a firm, salty cheese beside it. A classic partner is Manchego, the pressed sheep's-milk wheel of La Mancha.

The recipe starts with the fruit. Homemade membrillo is forgiving once you know what the pot should look like, and one batch makes far more than a single party needs. The toasts take ten minutes. The paste needs an afternoon and a night to set, so start a day ahead.

Why a quince sets itself, and why it turns red

Quinces carry an unusual amount of pectin, the carbohydrate in plant cell walls that sets jam. Czech researchers who analyzed 22 quince cultivars and genotypes found high pectin contents, with the pear-shaped cultivar Hruškovitá reaching 3.51 grams per 100 grams of fresh fruit. They note that quinces are important to the canning industry, especially because of their high pectin content. Membrillo needs no packet of pectin. Harold McGee lays out the mechanism in On Food and Cooking: sugar pulls water away from the long pectin chains, acid from the lemon neutralizes the electrical charges that keep them apart, and once enough water has boiled off they bond into a network firm enough to cut with a knife.

Color is the slower chemistry, and the part the cook controls. Raw quince flesh is cream-colored, and its pucker comes from tannin-like phenolic compounds. According to McGee, long heating in the presence of acid converts some of those colorless compounds into anthocyanins, the red pigments of cherries and berries. In practice, color works like a clock. A purée boiled hard can thicken before it has had time to redden. One that spends an hour and a half at a lazy bubble goes coral, then rose, then a deep garnet, by which point it looks like membrillo.

The cheese, and why its age decides the toast

Queso Manchego is a protected designation of origin, and its specification is exact. The milk must come only from sheep of the Manchega breed, raised on pasture in La Mancha, a zone drawn across municipalities in the provinces of Albacete, Ciudad Real, Cuenca and Toledo. Milking, making, pressing, salting and aging all have to happen inside it. Wheels of 1.5 kilos or less must age at least 30 days and larger wheels at least 60, and nothing older than two years may carry the name. A label reading artesano means the cheese was made from raw milk.

That two-year window means one name covers two different cheeses. The official description calls the paste firm and compact, buttery and slightly floury, with a slightly acidic flavor that turns picante, or sharp, in well-cured cheeses, and a texture that can go granular in the most mature wheels. A thick slab of quince can overwhelm a young Manchego, while an old, picante one can carry more. So the proportions on the toast follow the cheese: the older the Manchego, the thicker the membrillo. The table under "Building the toasts" gives the measurements. For a wider comparison of what goes next to cheese, the guide to choosing honey, mostarda or membrillo sets the three side by side.

Ingredients

For the membrillo (about 1.2 kg, one 20 cm or 8 inch square pan)

  • 1 kg (2 1/4 lb) ripe quinces, 3 to 4 large. Ripe ones are fully colored, with a skin that has gone from downy to waxy.
  • About 800 g (4 cups) granulated sugar. The exact amount is the weight of the cooked purée.
  • 1 lemon: two wide strips of peel and all of its juice
  • Water to cover
  • A little neutral oil for the pan

For 24 toasts

  • 1 baguette or other long, slim loaf
  • 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus a few drops to finish
  • 250 g (9 oz) Queso Manchego, any age
  • About 200 g (7 oz) of the membrillo
  • Flaky sea salt, such as Maldon (shop Maldon sea salt)

Method

  1. Prepare the quinces. Rub the gray fuzz off under running water. Quinces are hard, so quarter them on a board with a heavy knife and keep your fingers well clear. Cut out the cores and seeds, leave the peel on (it purées smoothly) and cut the flesh into 3 cm chunks. The cut faces will brown within minutes, which doesn't matter here.
  2. Poach. Put the quince and lemon peel in the widest heavy pot you own and cover with water by 2 cm. Simmer until a knife slides through every piece with no resistance, 30 to 45 minutes. In Denver, where water boils at a lower temperature, trust the knife rather than the clock. Undercooked chunks can leave hard flecks in the paste.
  3. Purée and weigh. Drain thoroughly and fish out the lemon peel. Purée the fruit in a food processor or pass it through a food mill until completely smooth. Weigh the purée and measure the same weight of sugar. Equal weights, the traditional half-sugar, half-quince formula, give a paste firm enough to slice. You can drop the sugar to three-quarters of the purée's weight for a tarter, softer block, but it needs a longer reduction and stays tackier.
  4. Dissolve the sugar. Return the purée to the pot with the sugar and lemon juice. Stir over low heat for 5 to 10 minutes, until a smear on the back of the spoon feels smooth, with no grit. Undissolved crystals can seed more crystals later and make the block grainy.
  5. Reduce slowly. Raise the heat to medium-low so the paste blips rather than boils. It spits hot sugar, so use a long wooden spoon or heatproof spatula with a flat edge, keep your sleeves down and hold the lid at an angle as a shield. Scrape the bottom every few minutes at first and almost constantly in the last half hour. Expect 60 to 90 minutes. Color is your progress bar: apricot, then coral, then rose, then garnet. It is done when three things are true. The paste pulls away from the sides and moves as a single mass. A spoon dragged across the bottom leaves a clean channel that holds for a second or two before closing. And a teaspoonful dropped on a cold plate firms within a minute without spreading.

    At altitude: water boils at about 202°F to 203°F at 5,000 feet, close to Denver's elevation, rather than 212°F, and every sugar temperature drops with it. At 5,000 feet, jelly sets at about 210°F instead of 220°F, and any sea-level figure should be lowered by the difference between your boiling point and 212°F. Membrillo is cooked much thicker than jelly, and a thermometer is hard to read in a paste this dense, so the spoon channel and the cold plate are the more practical tests at any elevation. The Denver altitude cooking guide explains how to find your own boiling point.
  6. Set overnight. Line a 20 cm (8 inch) square pan with parchment and oil it lightly. Scrape in the paste, level it with an oiled offset spatula to about 2 cm deep, and leave it uncovered at room temperature for at least 12 hours. If the surface is still tacky, give it another day. Turn it out, wrap it in parchment and refrigerate.
  7. Toast the bread. Heat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Slice the bread 1 cm thick on a long diagonal, brush one side with olive oil, and bake on a sheet for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are golden and the slices are crisp but still have a little give in the center. Let them cool completely, because warm toast makes the cheese sweat and the quince slide. Take the Manchego out of the fridge now, too. Cheese tastes fuller at room temperature.
  8. Slice and build. Cut the rind off the Manchego and slice it 3 to 4 mm thick, then into triangles that fit the toast. Slice the membrillo with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped between cuts, at the thickness the table below suggests for your cheese. Lay the cheese on the toast and the quince on the cheese so the color shows. Finish with two or three flakes of salt and a drop of oil, and serve within the hour, before the toast softens.

When the paste misbehaves

Symptom Likely cause Fix
Still soft and tacky after a night Stopped before the spoon channel held Scrape it back into the pot and cook on. Or dry the slab in the oven at its lowest setting with the door propped open, an hour at a time, then cool it again
Beige or pale orange Cooked too fast on high heat, so the color never had time to develop It still tastes good. Next batch, turn the heat down and allow the full 60 to 90 minutes
Dark flecks and a bitter edge Paste caught on the bottom Move it to a clean pot without scraping the scorched layer in. Use a wide, heavy pot and keep the spoon moving across the bottom in the last half hour
Grainy texture Sugar boiled before it had dissolved Dissolve it completely over low heat before raising the heat
Rubbery, cracks when sliced Over-reduced Slice it thin and it still works. Next time, stop when the channel holds for a second or two, not when it stays open
Soggy toast under the cheese Built on warm bread, or too long before serving Cool the toast fully and assemble within an hour of eating

Building the toasts

The ratio moves with the cheese. These are starting points, per toast.

Approximate age How it eats Cheese slice Membrillo slice
Young, two to three months Slightly acidic, buttery, a little floury 4 mm 2 to 3 mm, a sliver
Middle-aged, around six months Strong and savory, still slightly acidic 4 mm 4 mm, level with the cheese
Old, a year or more Picante, can be granular 3 mm; it crumbles if thicker 5 mm, thicker than the cheese

A strip of cured ham folded between cheese and quince adds a third layer of salt that suits the youngest cheese best, where the quince is thinnest. Jamón Serranía (shop Jamón Serranía) fits, and the jamón ibérico guide explains how the Spanish grades differ. If toasting is more than the evening allows, a thin, crisp cracker does the same job. The Rustic Bakery Sel Gris flatbread (shop Rustic Bakery Sel Gris flatbread) is one option.

Quinces are an autumn fruit. When they are gone, Italian mostarda takes the same spot on a cheese plate. Casa Forcello (shop Casa Forcello pear mostarda) makes one from pear, and the pear mostarda recipe shows how to make it yourself. Served at the aperitif hour with a vermouth or a dry sherry, the toasts belong to the tradition described in the Spanish vermut hour guide.

What to tell the table

Marmalade once meant this. In Portuguese, the quince is marmelo and the paste made from it is marmelada. When English borrowed the word, by way of French, it borrowed the quince paste along with it. By the 1530s at the latest, "marmalade" in English meant a quince preserve or confection, and citrus preserves took the name in the 17th century. That settles the story that the word comes from "Marie est malade," supposedly murmured by the attendants of Mary, Queen of Scots, as they fed their sick mistress preserves. Mary was born in December 1542, after the word was already in English.

The Spanish and Portuguese names share an ancestor. Membrillo and marmelo both descend from the Latin melimelum, a sweet apple, from the Greek melímēlon: meli, honey, and mēlon, apple.

One Andalusian town built an industry on it. Puente Genil, in the province of Córdoba, turned membrillo into a factory product by the end of the nineteenth century, according to a Pablo de Olavide University account, and had more than twenty makers at its peak. They packed the paste in lithographed tins, which are now studied as heritage objects. An article in Revista PH, the journal of the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage, describes tins printed with Murillo's Immaculate Conception, Goyesque scenes, designs drawn from the Roman wall paintings of Pompeii and Sancho Panza's banquet from Don Quixote.

The rind carries the mold's print. The zigzag weave on the side of a Manchego is the impression of the pleita mold. The flower pattern pressed into each flat face is the flor. Every genuine wheel also carries a numbered casein tag on the rind and a numbered back label, both issued by the regulatory council. The protected-origin dossier cites Don Quixote itself as evidence of how long La Mancha has made cheese.

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, where visitors can ask staff questions, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

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