When I was growing up in Argentina, quince paste was simply... there.
It lived in our fridge alongside dulce de batata, another fruit paste that every Argentine family seemed to have. We were a big family, so my mum bought the huge round tins that every neighbourhood grocery store kept behind the counter. Someone would slice off a piece, wrap the rest back up and put it in the fridge until the next time.
I never thought much about it.
Back then, supermarkets were only just beginning to appear. Most of us still shopped at the local almacén, the kind of neighbourhood grocery where the owner knew every customer by name and weighed everything in front of you. I even remember one of the first supermarket-style shops in Buenos Aires, called Rayito de Sol. It felt modern at the time, but the quince paste was exactly the same block of deep red sweetness I'd always known.
The funny thing is that, for years, I thought quince was a dessert.
Not a fruit.
A dessert.
In Argentina, quince paste is everywhere. We eat it with cheese in a dessert known as vigilante. It fills pasta frola, one of our most beloved tarts. It's tucked inside little fried pastries, baked into sweet empanadas with cheese, or simply spread over buttered bread for afternoon tea.
When I spent some time living in Brazil, I found their version of the same idea: Romeo e Julieta. Instead of quince, they pair cheese with guava paste. Different fruit, same brilliant combination.
As a child, I occasionally tasted homemade quince paste. It was often dusted with coarse sugar crystals and had a much deeper flavour than the industrial version. I loved it.
But I still had never seen a quince.
I had never seen a tree.
I had never seen the fruit growing.
For me, quince only existed after someone had already turned it into a block of paste.
Everything changed years later when friends invited me to San Juan, where I finally saw quince orchards and tasted truly artisanal quince paste. It completely changed the way I thought about a flavour I'd known my whole life.
Then I moved to London. To my surprise, Turkish and Middle Eastern shops sold fresh quinces every autumn. I discovered that outside Argentina the fruit is roasted, cooked with meat, turned into desserts and celebrated in ways I had never imagined.
The imported quince paste I could buy was expensive and rarely tasted the way I remembered, so I started making my own. I simmer the fruit with cinnamon and cloves, blend it with the skins for their natural pectin, and slowly cook it until it becomes the deep ruby paste I grew up with.
Today I still use it for pasta frola and pastelitos, but it has also become one of my signature ice creams.
Funny how moving to another country taught me what had been sitting in my parents' fridge all along.