The One Drink and the No-Drink
Quince and Toasted-Rice Cooler with Lemon Foam
Quince is inedible raw, hard as a doorknob, and spectacular after twenty minutes in sugar water. Cook the peels and cores with it, because that is where the perfume is.
Serve alongside
Manchego with quince paste, which is the same two ingredients arriving by a different route. Toasted-rice tea is nutty and dry, and hard sheep's cheese is the closest thing on a plate to that.
Tools
A saucepan and your heaviest knife — raw quince is genuinely hard and a small knife will slip. Clean shaker for the foam. Fine sieve. A ladle or a wide spoon for straining the syrup without pressing. A stemmed goblet, or any glass with a bowl wide enough to hold a cap.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Quince (tart apple), sugar, toasted-rice tea or genmaicha, lemon, aquafaba, salt, soda water, a thin quince or apple fan.
Magic
Put the peels and cores in the pan with the fruit. Quince keeps most of its perfume and nearly all of its pectin in the skin and the seed core, and the standard instinct — peel it, core it, cook the tidy part — throws away the best of it. The syrup comes out deeper, faintly pink, and with body the flesh alone cannot give you. Strain it all out at the end and lose nothing. Not feeling brave? Cook the fruit alone and add a strip of lemon peel to the pan.
Gotcha
Do not let the syrup reduce toward jam. Quince is so high in pectin that a pan left five minutes too long sets into something you can turn upside down, and past that point it will not pour, will not shake, and the aroma has cooked off along with the water. Pull it while it still runs off the spoon in a thin stream.
Quince is a difficult sell. It is inedible raw, it is hard enough to blunt a knife, it appears for about six weeks a year, and it looks like a lumpy pear that has been through something. Nobody picks one up on impulse.
Cook it in sugar water for twenty minutes and it becomes one of the best things in a glass all autumn — floral in a way apples never manage, honeyed, with a tannic grip at the back that keeps the sweetness from spreading out. That transformation is the whole idea behind the name. It is also, more practically, why the syrup is worth making even if you only ever put it in soda water.
Letting the secondary element take the scene once conditions allow is a Room for Drama move.
Quince syrup
Simmer chopped quince with equal parts water and sugar until the fruit softens and the liquid becomes fragrant and golden, about 20 minutes. Strain, cool, and refrigerate for one week.
Strain it by pouring, or by lifting the fruit out. Pressing the softened quince through a sieve gives you cloudy syrup full of fine solids, and in a drink with foam on top that haze shows.
The cooked fruit left in the sieve is excellent and should not go in the bin. Mash it with a little of its syrup and it is a compote for yogurt, or for the cheese board that is probably happening at the same party.
Toasted-rice tea
Genmaicha is the easy route, or steep toasted rice with a mild green tea. Brew briefly — green tea held too long goes bitter and stays that way — then chill completely. Nutty on the nose, dry at the finish.
The tea is standing in for a spirit here. That dry, slightly savory floor is what stops a syrup-and-soda drink from tasting like a syrup-and-soda drink.
Build the cooler
Makes: 1 drink. Time: 12 minutes, plus the syrup. Glass: stemmed goblet.
- 1 1/2 ounces quince syrup
- 2 ounces chilled toasted-rice tea
- 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
- 1/2 ounce aquafaba
- 1 pinch salt
- 2 ounces chilled soda water
- 1 thin quince or apple fan
The pour, drawn to scale
- quince syrup1 1/2 ounces22%
- chilled toasted-rice tea2 ounces30%
- fresh lemon juice3/4 ounce11%
- aquafaba1/2 ounce7%
- chilled soda water2 ounces30%
Dry shake the syrup, tea, lemon, aquafaba and salt with no ice for 10 to 15 seconds.
Shake again with ice until cold.
Strain fine over fresh ice in the goblet.
Top with soda, poured slowly down the side. Fast soda punches a hole through the foam and then you are watching it try to reassemble.
Set a thin fruit fan at the rim.
Half an ounce of aquafaba, and no more
This is a cooler with a cap, not a sour with a lid. Half an ounce gives you a lively quarter-inch that sits on the drink and lets the quince through. Three-quarters and it separates into a distinct layer, and quince aroma — which is the entire reason anyone went to the trouble — gets trapped underneath it.
Glass and ice
A stem, because your hand warms a tumbler and this drink is meant to stay cold through six ounces. Fresh ice, medium cubes rather than one large one, since the foam needs a stable surface and a single big cube tends to tilt and shove the cap sideways.
Four servings
Combine quince syrup, tea, lemon and salt for four servings and refrigerate four hours. Add aquafaba and shake each portion individually, then top with soda.
Split the labor honestly: the syrup can be made a week ahead, the tea two days ahead, the base that morning. What cannot be moved is the shake, which has to happen per glass and takes about forty seconds including the pour.
If you are serving eight people and would rather talk to them, make the still version — no aquafaba, no soda, poured over one large cube. It loses the cap and gains the ability to be handed out from a pitcher. Quince holds up perfectly well without foam. Foam is a decision, not a requirement.
The spirited version
Calvados, an ounce, and it is close to inevitable — apple brandy and quince come from the same orchard logic. A lightly aged rum works too. Cut the tea to an ounce and a half to keep the glass from running over.
Zero-proof, though, is where I would leave it. The toasted rice is doing something a spirit cannot, which is add dryness without adding weight, and the drink is more distinctive as it stands than it is as a slightly better-known apple cocktail.
Food
Quince and cheese is an old pairing for a reason, so anything on that board. It also sits well beside roast pork or duck, where the tannin in the fruit does the job a glass of wine would.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
