"Membrillo!" V chirped excitedly, and quickened her pace towards the entrance of Domaine Morizet in Viré.
Christelle Morizet turned out to be the most welcoming of cave-dwellers we came across in Burgundy. At a long table with a chequered table-cloth we had a compact feast of cheesey delicacies washed down with Viré-Clessé, their delectable local white wine.
At the end of the session she sent her daughter out to collect some membrillos for us, a bulbous velvety-skinned fruit known to the French as coin, and to the English as quince.
Native to the Caucasus, the Greeks brought quince to the Med. The Romans carried them on westwards to Spain, where they are today cultivated in greatest density around Córdoba (Roman Corduba). The Romans also concocted an alcoholic beverage called Cydonium from this naturally bitter fruit.
We later found another good example of a quince tree in the middle of a peristyle courtyard in Pompeii. The fruit has a long association with Venus, Goddess of Love and patroness of the Campanian city. In earlier Greek myth it was in fact a quince that was awarded to Aphrodite following the Judgement of Paris.
Presumably it the Spanish and Portuguese that carried membrillo to the New World. V's mother used to make mermelada from membrillos. Indeed the English word marmalade comes from the Portuguese word for quince - marmelo. When V was around eight she remembers regularly accompanying her father on trips to one of his terrenos near Paramos called El Rastro.
Many years ago there used to be an adobe brick slaughterhouse close to this plantation and the bones of dead cattle still emerge from its dusty soil and buzzards dally in the skies above as if genetically-programmed for this long-discontinued blowout. (Similarly, vultures return annually to the great gorge of Ronda in Spain where the carcasses of horses killed in the bull-ring were tossed before the advent of more humane times..when they chucked dead fascists down there instead.)
While her father was distracted in his negotiations V would slip away into a neighbouring plantation, climb up into the upper branches of a quince tree and begin the harvest. You're not really supposed to be able to enjoy membrillos raw, but V swears that her afternoon spoils were always thoroughly delicious. We shall see what culinary fate awaits the membrillos we brought back from Viré.
