Quince
A hard, intensely fragrant fruit that is inedible raw and transformed by cooking. Korean mogwa-cha is a sugar or honey preserve stirred into hot water, on the same principle as yuja-cha, and it is a winter fixture.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Cydonia oblonga
- Family
- Rosaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- The Caucasus and Iran; cultivated across Eurasia
- Drunk in
- Korea, Turkey, Iran, Portugal
Character
Perfumed in a way that sits between pear, apple and rose, sweet from the preserving and faintly astringent underneath. The aroma of a raw quince in a room is its most famous property.
Notes: quince, pear, rose
History
Cultivated around the Caucasus and eastern Mediterranean since antiquity, and probably the fruit behind several classical references now read as apples. Membrillo in Iberia, cotignac in France and marmelada in Portugal are all quince preserves, and the last gave English the word marmalade.
How it is drunk
Mogwa-cha is drunk across Korea in winter; Turkey and Iran cook it with meat and into preserves; Iberia makes membrillo to eat with cheese. It is almost never eaten raw anywhere.
Production
Fruit is sliced thin and layered with sugar or honey for weeks, or dried. Its high pectin is why it sets so readily into pastes, and the flesh turns from pale yellow to deep pink with long cooking.
Preparation
Infusion · Decoction
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 85–90 °C · 2 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Japanese flowering quince is a different genus and is not the culinary fruit. Mogwa-cha is a preserve, not a dried infusion material.
Common mistakes
- Trying it raw. It is hard, sour and astringent, and cooking is not optional.
Related botanicals
- Dried apple — Rosaceae fruits that turn perfumed and rosy with long cooking, and that carry enough pectin to set.
Comparisons
- Quince vs dried apple — Two Rosaceae fruits, one of which is inedible raw and one of which is the invisible bulk of half the fruit infusions on sale. Quince is a preserve; apple is a filler.
- Yuzu vs quince — Two Korean winter preserves spooned into hot water rather than steeped, made the same way from fruits that are otherwise nothing alike.
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Cydonia oblonga Mill. — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Quince is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.