Slow Food - Chicken Tagine with Quinces

I have a post about time and money sort of queued up for when I have time to focus. For now, just in time for the weekend, I bring you a slow recipe, just the thing for a nice cozy Saturday or Sunday afternoon in the kitchen. I’m mindful of the irony of calling a recipe that takes an hour and a half or so “slow,” when that’s how long my mother spent on dinner almost every night of her married life, but what can I say? Times have changed. (And more on that when I get to that post about time and money.)

It all started with the quinces.

About a month ago, my husband and I agreed that, while at Whole Foods, we’d pick up some sort of produce we’d never tried before. At one point, this was supposed to be a weekly practice, but frankly it’s hard to find something in an American grocery store I haven’t eaten at least once. I’ve always been drawn to exotic foods. I am the person who introduced my family to that strange vegetable, broccoli, in the 80s. So often, something we haven’t tried becomes something he hasn’t tried. And if he hasn’t tried it, I probably haven’t eaten it in the last five years (the length of our acquaintance), so it’s still an experiment in food diversity.

That particular week, he and I had not managed to pick out our strange produce before he got bored and wandered off to the seafood department. That’s when I happened upon a mound of quinces. I recognized them immediately; I’d seen photos of them; but I couldn’t remember ever eating them. Mission accomplished - I put two into our basket, after first inhaling their deep, round, sweet fragrance. Quinces smell like a combination of tropical flowers and tropical fruit, with the faintest aroma of maple, vanilla, pears, and apples. These last two are unsurprising, since all three fruits are in the same family. Deborah Madison described the aroma as a combination of narcissus and oak leaves, and I sorta see her point, too. Really, they’re hard to describe. Go get your own quince and sniff it.

It was fun trying to get past the checkout clerk. “Is this an apple?” he said.

“It’s a quince,” I said.

“Is it a pear?” He was trying to find the price code on his alphabetical cheat sheet.

“It’s a quince,” I repeated. I wasn’t really sure what more to say to help him here. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to find it under “P.”

“Is it an apple?”

Oh, boy. “It’s a quince. Q-U-I-N-C-E.” By now I felt like a jerk. Why couldn’t I just buy apples like everyone else?

He looked puzzled.

“Look,” I said, finally figuring out how to help him. “It’s got a sticker with the price code on it.”

“Oh!” he said, brightening, and that cleared the matter up for him.

Once we had them, we had to figure out what to do with them. And for a devoted low-carber married to an, um, moderate-carber, this turned out to be quite a challenge. Every cookbook I consulted offered pretty much the same advice - poach them in a sugar syrup, using equal weights of quinces and sugar, or make quince paste, using equal weights of quinces and sugar! I was wondering if I was going to have to prepare them and freeze them in tiny containers for a very rare high-carb visit to the honey tree.

In the meantime, they sat in that pretty blue and gold pottery bowl you see above, a wedding present from a friend with good taste. Every night after dinner we’d pass them around and smell them. (The Victorians used to use them to scent their dresser drawers.)

Searching through my forty cookbooks, I found a recipe in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for an applesauce laced with quinces, and I thought that sounded pretty good and maybe not too egregiously loaded with sugar. Then, as a last resort, I looked them up in Larousse Gastronomique and found a recipe for chicken with quinces! And no added sugar!

Usually my husband cooks on the weekends, but the tagine, which required two simmering periods of a half hour each, was not weeknight fare for a two-job family. I traded nights with him, bought a chicken, and prepared to start simmering. Then, looking again at the Larousse recipe, something didn’t sound right. The dish claimed to be a tagine, which is a sort of spicy Moroccan stew cooked in a heavy clay pot. But this dish was seasoned solely with a pinch of ground ginger and a little parsley and coriander. Wrong, wrong, wrong, said my inner lover of exotic food. (I have long suspected Larousse, in spite of its French name and the preponderance of French cuisine, of being British.) So I consulted a bunch of other cookbooks (the latest edition of Joy of Cooking, Dana Carpender’s 500 Low-Carb Recipes, and Diane Kochilas’s Against the Grain) to get a sense of what spices go into a real tagine. This recipe uses the cooking method (and quinces!) of the Larousse recipe, with a spice mixture adapted from the other books.

Still mindful of all those recipes calling for bucketloads of sugar, I was curious about how a raw quince would taste. While preparing the dish, I cut myself a very fine sliver and ate it. The texture was like an Asian pear, pleasingly granular, but a lot drier. Mostly I got that wonderful flowery fruity fragrance. Encouraged, I cut myself a larger chunk. Wow! Talk about pucker. It was like sucking on an inferior teabag - quinces are clearly loaded with tannins. So, no, I don’t think quinces can be eaten raw. However, I am encouraged by this recipe to think that quinces do not have to be sweetened.

I think - I hope - you should be able to find quinces in the store for a week or two more, though the supply at Whole Foods is starting to dwindle. If there are none where you are, you could try the recipe with firm, tart apples, though the carb count would be different.

Chicken Tagine with Quinces

Serves 4

This is pretty darn hot. If you, or someone you are cooking for, doesn’t like spicy food, cut the cayenne and black pepper in half. If you really don’t like spicy food, cut all the spices in half.

1 whole chicken, cut into parts, or about 3 lbs of your favorite bone-in chicken parts
2 tbsp fat for cooking (olive or coconut oil, rendered chicken or duck fat, or butter)
2 cups chopped raw onions (about 1 medium-to-large onion)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp each ground coriander, ground cumin, ground ginger, paprika, turmeric, and black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne
generous pinch of saffron (optional)
1 cup chicken broth or water
2 large quinces
1/4 cup butter (half a stick)
chopped parsley and cilantro for garnish
add salt at table, if desired

Remove the skin from the chicken. (You can save this for the stockpot or brown it in the oven for a snack. You’re removing it because chicken skin is unappealingly flabby when it’s cooked with moist heat, as you’re doing here. But chicken skin is loaded with monounsaturated fat and vitamin A, so do try find a way to eat it.)

Brown the chicken pieces in a large, deep skillet or a Dutch oven in the 2 tbsp of fat until nicely, attractively browned. (Depending on the size of your pot or pan you might have to do this in 2 batches.) Add the onions and cook until beginning to get soft and translucent. Add the spices and stir to distribute through onion mixture. Add the chicken broth or water, cover, and simmer on medium for 30 minutes.

While the chicken is simmering, wash the quinces, cut them into eighths, and remove the cores. Brown the quinces in the butter in a separate skillet. (Again, you might need to do two batches.) The whole washing, cutting, coring, and browning step took me the same 30 minutes that the chicken was simmering.

Add the quinces to the chicken mixture, cover, and simmer on low for another 30 minutes. The sauce will be quite thick - quinces contain pectin, the same substance that makes jams and jellies thick and jiggly.

To serve, give each diner about a quarter of the chicken parts and four quince wedges. Spoon the sauce over the chicken and fruit, and garnish with parsley and cilantro.

Analysis (from Nutritiondata.com)

Calories: 421; Calories from fat: 206; % calories from fat: 49%. Total fat: 23 g. Total carb: 17 g. Fiber: 3 g. Usable carb: 14 g. Protein: 37 g.

To me, 14 g of carb for an entree is not bad. (We did this last weekend, and I forget what we had as a side dish, maybe broccoli with olive oil.) If you would like to reduce the carb count, you could use 1 cup of onion and one quince for a net carb count of 7 grams. But the quinces are so luscious, you might find yourself staring longingly at your plate, wishing for more quinces! You could compromise by using the smaller amount of onion but the full amount of quinces, for a net carb count of 11 grams.