Home › Jellies and Jams › Plum Jelly
Plum Jelly
If plums are wild (not cultivated) put in pan and sprinkle with soda and pour hot water over them, let stand a few moments and stir through them; take out and put on with water just to cover, or less if plums are very juicy; boil till soft, dip out juice with a china cup; then strain the rest through small salt-bags (by the way, keep them for jelly-bags as they are just the thing), do not squeeze them. Take pound for pound of juice and sugar, or pint for pint, and boil for eight or ten minutes. Jelly will be nicer if only one measure or a measure and a half is made at one time; if more, boil longer; some boil juice ten or fifteen minutes, then add sugar and boil five minutes longer. It can be tested by dropping in a saucer and placing on ice or in a cool place; if it does not spread but remains rounded it is finished. If the plums are the cultivated wild plum, make as above without using the soda. Take the plums that are left and press through a sieve, then take pint for pint of sugar and pulp, boiling the latter half an hour and then adding sugar, boiling ten or fifteen minutes more. Half a pint sugar to a pint, makes a rich marmalade, and one-third pint to pint, boiling it longer, is nice canned, and used for pies, adding milk, eggs and sugar as for squash pies.
Plum-apple jelly may be made by preparing the juice of apples and plums as above (a nice proportion is one part plums to two parts apples; for instance, one peck of plums to two pecks apples); then mixing the juice and finish without flavoring. The marmalade is made in the same way as above. Some add a little ginger root to it. One bushel of apples and one peck of plums make forty pints of jelly, part crab-apple and part mixed, and sixteen quart glass cans of mixed marmalade. In making either kind of jelly the fruit may be squeezed and the juice strained twice through swiss or crinoline and made into jelly. The pulp can not then be used for marmalade.
A working set of plum-jelly instructions from an era before commercial pectin, written for people processing fruit by the peck. The proportions still hold; the vocabulary and the storage advice need translating.
- The soda wash, and why to rinse hardSprinkling soda (bicarbonate) over truly wild plums and scalding them cuts the harsh astringency in the skins. Rinse the fruit thoroughly in fresh water before cooking or the jelly will taste flat and faintly soapy, and the soda will neutralize acid the set depends on.
- Don't squeeze the bagThis is the hinge of the whole recipe. Pressing the pulp drives fine solids through the cloth and gives cloudy jelly; let it drip, even if it takes several hours. The recipe's own alternative at the end -- squeezing and straining the juice twice through fabric -- is the faster route, and the text notes what it costs you: the pulp can no longer be used for marmalade.
- Salt-bags, swiss and crinolineSmall cotton salt sacks were the household jelly bag. Use a purpose-made jelly bag or two layers of unbleached muslin scalded first; swiss was a fine sheer cotton and crinoline a stiff open-weave cloth (originally horsehair and linen, by this date often stiffened cotton), so plain cheesecloth doubled several times is the nearest equivalent.
- Pound for pound, pint for pintEqual weights or volumes of juice and sugar is a full-sugar jelly and will set on plum pectin alone, no added pectin needed. Wild and semi-wild plums are high in both pectin and acid; slightly underripe fruit sets best.
- Small batches are not sentimentThe instruction to boil only a measure or a measure and a half at a time is sound. A wide shallow pan and no more than about six cups of juice at once gives fast evaporation and a bright set; large batches need long boiling and turn dark and syrupy.
- The saucer test in numbersThe cold-saucer test described here corresponds to roughly 220F (104C) at sea level, or about 8F above the boiling point of water where you live. A drop that mounds rather than spreads is done; pull the pan off the heat while you test.
- A peck, a bushelA peck is 8 dry quarts, about 10-12 lb of plums or apples; a bushel is four pecks, roughly 42-48 lb of apples.
- "As for squash pies"The low-sugar canned pulp is meant as a pie filling thinned with milk, eggs and sugar in the manner of a custard-set squash or pumpkin pie. Treat it as a fruit puree base, not a finished filling.
- StorageNothing here says how to seal the jelly, because the period answers were a paper cover or melted paraffin over the glass (the marmalade is put up in quart glass cans). Full-sugar jelly is high-acid and keeps well, but use current water-bath processing times for jams and jellies, and refrigerate the reduced-sugar pulp rather than shelf-storing it.
Buckeye Cookery came out of 1870s Ohio, and this entry is written for a household with access to wild plums, most likely Prunus americana or the improved selections of native plum the recipe calls the "cultivated wild plum" a few lines later. Those native plums are small, thick-skinned and astringent, which is why the soda treatment appears at all and why the improved strains are exempted from it. The apple-and-plum combination is a thrift measure as much as a flavor one: apples supplied bulk and dependable pectin, plums the color and acidity, and a peck of foraged fruit stretched a long way against a bushel of orchard fruit. The instruction to keep used salt sacks for jelly bags belongs to the same economy, and so does the careful accounting of exactly how many pints and quart cans a given quantity of fruit will fill — preserving here is inventory work for the winter cellar, not a weekend project.