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Euchered Plums
Nine pounds blue plums, six pounds sugar, two quarts vinegar, one ounce cinnamon; boil vinegar, sugar and spice together, pour over plums, draw off next morning and boil, pour back on plums, repeat the boiling five mornings, the last time boiling the fruit about twenty minutes. - Mrs. Capt. W. B. Brown, Washington City.
A five-day sweet pickle in which the syrup, not the fruit, does the work. The plums stay whole because they are never boiled until the final morning.
- The hingeResist cooking the fruit during the first four days. Hot syrup poured over raw plums draws out water and drives sugar in gradually, which is what keeps them from collapsing into jam. Only on the fifth morning do the plums go into the pan, for about twenty minutes.
- Scale it downNine pounds of plums and two quarts of vinegar is a very large batch by modern standards. The ratio holds at any size: 3 lb plums, 2 lb sugar, 2 2/3 cups vinegar, 1/3 oz cinnamon.
- One ounce cinnamonBy weight, not volume. Whole bark, tied in muslin, keeps the syrup clear; one ounce is roughly eight to ten sticks. Ground cinnamon in that quantity would turn the syrup muddy and gritty.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied in strength and was not standardised. Use a 5 percent acidity cider or white wine vinegar; the acid is what preserves the fruit alongside the sugar.
- The plums"Blue plums" here most likely means the small dark oval sorts — Italian prune plums, or damsons. Leave them whole and unpeeled, and prick each once or twice with a needle so the skins do not burst as the syrup penetrates.
- Where the plums sit between boilingsThe original assumes a cool cellar or larder. Cover the crock or bowl and keep it in the refrigerator between the daily boilings; five days at modern room temperature invites surface yeast and mould on the syrup.
- No sealing instructionsThe recipe stops at the last boiling, as period recipes usually do, because the crock went to the cellar. Pack the hot plums and syrup into clean jars and keep them refrigerated, or follow current tested water-bath directions if you want shelf-stable jars.
- ServingBest treated as a condiment rather than a dessert compote — a spoonful alongside roast pork, ham, goose or cold meats, in the same role as cranberry sauce or chutney. The syrup thickens further in the jar.
"Euchered" comes from euchre, the trick-taking card game that swept American parlours in the mid-nineteenth century; to euchre someone was to outwit or get the better of them, and the name may well be a cook's joke about having bested the plums, which give up their juice without ever losing their shape. The technique itself is much older than the pun: repeatedly drawing off and reboiling a syrup, then returning it to the fruit, is a standard preindustrial way to candy or sweet-pickle whole produce without cooking it to mush, and it appears in British and American receipt books for greengages, cherries and melon rind. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was assembled largely from recipes contributed by Ohio women, and it carries a substantial run of pickles, sweet ones among them. The attribution to Mrs. Capt. W. B. Brown of "Washington City" is typical of the book's habit of crediting each contributor by her husband's rank and town.