Sometimes I want to make something just because of how the name sounds. That’s exactly what happened with apple quiddany, or, as written in the book, “quiddony of pippins”. Pippins are a type of apple, but also a more or less generic name for apples in the early modern period. I had never heard the term quiddany before I came across it in A Queen’s Delight, or the Art of Preserving, Conserving, and Candying, published in London in 1662. I looked around the internet to see if I could find other recipes for quiddany, and there are some earlier ones, and some later ones, including in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, but not many. The spelling variations also don’t help in finding them.
I couldn’t find anyone who had made it, or any other quiddany recipes, and written about it, so I didn’t know exactly what it was supposed to look like. The recipe gave one clue, it is solid enough to be unmolded, but that was it. I had very little else to go by. The definition of the word itself raises more questions than it answers. Merriam-Webster says that quiddany is a jelly or syrup, which doesn’t really align with the recipe. You cannot unmold a syrup, and a syrup is not a jelly. Other sources that define the word claim that it is somewhere between a syrup and a marmalade. Again, this does not align with the recipes I studied.