Home › Preserving, Drying and Canning Fruit › To Dry Plums
To Dry Plums
Split ripe plums, take the stones from them, and lay them on plates or sieves to dry, in a warm oven or hot sun; take them in at sunset, and do not put them out again until the sun will be upon them; turn them that they may be done evenly; when perfectly dry, pack them in jars or boxes lined with paper, or keep them in jars; hang them in an airy place.
XIII. Miscellaneous Recipes for Preserving.
A workable method, and the only real skill is judging when the fruit is dry enough to store without molding. A dehydrator or a very low oven does the same job as the sun with far less babysitting.
- The hinge: dry until leathery, not brittle"Perfectly dry" means a plum half that is pliable and leathery, with no bead of moisture when you tear it open and squeeze the cut edge. Anything still juicy at the center will mold in the jar within weeks.
- Oven temperatureModern low-temperature drying runs 135-150F, with the door propped an inch or two so moisture escapes; too much heat case-hardens the outsides and seals wet interiors in. What this book meant by a "warm oven" is not recorded, and period usage of the term was probably hotter than that.
- Sun-drying in practiceYou need several consecutive days of dry heat above roughly 85F with low humidity. The instruction to bring the trays in at sunset is the important part -- night dew rewets the fruit and undoes a day's work.
- Cover the traysThe original says nothing about insects. Tent the fruit with cheesecloth or fine screen, raised off the surface, or you will be drying flies along with the plums.
- Use a freestone varietyItalian prune plums and other freestones split and pit cleanly, and their thicker flesh dries to a proper prune. Round clingstone dessert plums fight the knife and give a thinner, juicier result.
- Cut side upLay the halves skin down so the juices stay in the cup of the fruit rather than gluing it to the tray. Turning them, as directed, is worth doing once the surface has set.
- Condition before storagePack the cooled fruit loosely in a jar for a week and shake it daily. If any condensation appears on the glass, the batch needs more drying time; even moisture distribution is what prevents one damp plum spoiling the lot.
- Storage and yieldA cool dark cupboard beats the "airy place" of the original, which was really about avoiding a damp larder; long-term, the freezer is better still. Yield varies with the variety's sugar and water content: reckon on roughly 3 to 5 pounds of fresh plums for a pound of dried fruit.
Drying was the cheapest form of preservation in a household economy, needing neither sugar nor jars nor the cook's attention beyond carrying trays in and out, and books of this period place it beside canning and preserving as a matter of course. The dried plum is of course the prune, and by 1900 commercial prune orchards in California and around Agen in southwest France were doing at industrial scale exactly what this recipe describes, often with a hot lye dip to check the skins. The closing line, "XIII. Miscellaneous Recipes for Preserving," is a stray section heading from the book's own numbering rather than part of the method.