Why our Quince Paste now tastes a little different – and why that matters

Good news: our quince paste is back! After several months without it, England Preserves has secured a supply of quinces from Germany, and the first batch will be on our shelves next week. Long-time customers may notice a subtle change in flavour. For the first time, this much-loved paste has been made with fruit from outside the UK. The reason is simple: there just weren’t any English quinces available this season.

Quince by Pancrace Bessa c1835. 

Sky Cracknell, founder of England Preserves, told us how this year marked the end of a long and fruitful (quite literally) relationship with a retired farmer whose orchard had reliably supplied them with deeply perfumed quinces from well-established trees. He has recently passed away, and with no one to take over the orchard, the quinces are no longer being harvested for market. England Preserves is now actively searching for another domestic source and working with growers to find trees that might bear fruit in time for the 2025 harvest.

In the meantime, they’ve found a supplier of German quinces and made paste using their traditional, multi-day process: slow cooking the pulp, sieving, then cooking again with sugar and lemon until it sets naturally. The result is a paste that still wears its handmade nature proudly, and while the flavour is different from that of the English fruit – less aromatic, slightly firmer – it remains a thoughtful, elegant pairing for cheese.

The story behind this change points to a much wider issue. Quince has never been a commodity crop in the UK. Historically, it flourished on the margins of mixed farms, loved for its rich perfume, but never grown in great volume. In the EU, however, quince is produced cheaply and in bulk, often to be used as a filler in processed foods like baby purées. Quality is secondary to yield.

English Quince Trees - Courtesy of Quince Bakery

That model of agriculture – prioritising scale and price over flavour and diversity – has put immense pressure on small British fruit growers. Since the 1970s, Sky estimates, the UK has lost up to 70% of its top fruit orchards. Local wholesale markets have vanished, replaced by supermarket supply chains that demand uniformity, long shelf life, and ever-lower prices. In that world, crops like the variable, finicky, and hard to mechanise quince don’t stand a chance.

But people like Sky and the team at England Preserves are trying to change that. They’ve even helped to plan a new orchard of 24 quince trees in Walthamstow, which should start bearing fruit in a few years. In the meantime, we hope you’ll continue to support their work by sticking with their quince paste, even if it tastes a little different at the moment. It’s still made with care, still full of flavour, and still part of a bigger story: one where quality matters, and where small-scale, sustainable farming has a future.

England Preserves Quince Paste