QUINCE JELLY—shock of nostalgia

Remembering that our Bonne Maman Wild Blueberry Preserve—I mean the jam I occasionally have on toast at breakfast—was almost finished, I checked the supplies in the recently opened hypermart at Kemang Village. This shop is hyper… well of course, as the name suggests, it is huge and sells everything from electronics and white goods to meats, fish and vegetables. It is the latest of many branches of the chain, but unlike the others, where customers seem to go for large quantities—six refill packs of cooking oil, two boxes of instant noodles, and the like—this branch's assortment of fresh foods seems to be aimed at the tastes and requirements of more affluent consumers… while keeping its prices low! Once the word spreads, Ranch Market, Sogo's Foodhall and Kem Chick will undoubtedly feel the mounting competition.

But now back to the jams and confitures and preserves and jellies… To my great astonishment, hidden in the back of the shelf, I found a jar of Quince Jelly (also by Bonne Maman) and just reading the label spun me back six nearly seven decennia to the kitchen in Hilterfingen am Thunersee, the village of my childhood. My grandmother was preserving quinces—she called them quitten, as Hilterfingen is located in the German speaking part of Switzerland. They grew in a very big garden with lots of fruit trees: cherries (about five varieties), apples, prunes, greengages—my grandmother called them renekloden—pears, and of course the single quince tree in the lower garden at the end of the path on the left. While I was always reaching and climbing to get at ripe fruit, I never even looked at the quinces… at an early age I had learned that the raw fruit is totally unappetising.

Back home I immediately made myself a toast with the quince jelly. The taste was the same as I remembered, the consistency, however, very different. My grandmother condensed the jelly into a soft candy with crystallised sugar on top, which she then cut into diamonds.

As I said, the taste was the same and a flood of memories engulfed me: the blue room where my grandmother played solitary with me watching, the basement where she would do the laundry—boiling the sheets and towels and shirts and knickers and all the other dirty clothes in a big tub on a wood fire, and then putting them through a mangle that I would sometimes help her operate. I found myself again under the grand piano, I think it was a Steinway, in the large drawing room watching the grownups play bridge after dinner. And the little annex where aunty S slept when she was home, which meant that we, the children, were not allowed to play in that area before she got up somewhere around 10 or 11.

The house is still there as is the annex, but the garden has been divided into three parcels after my grandmother died. I visited the house again in the autumn of 2010. It all looked so much smaller and I could not imagine how they had managed to put in a grand piano and sofa and chairs, and find space for a bridge table, too.

That visit did not produce any nostalgic feelings, maybe because it was so very different from the home I used to know with its familiar cast of players. The present occupants, although related but of a much younger generation, asked us how it was in the old days… If I ever go there again I will bring a jar of quince jelly to really get the memories flowing.