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Plum Preserves
Allow equal weights sugar and plums; add sufficient water to the sugar to make a thick syrup, boil, skim, and pour over the plums (previously washed, pricked and placed in a stone jar), and cover with a plate. The next day drain off syrup, boil, skim, and pour in over plums; repeat this for three or four days, place plums and syrup in the preserving-kettle, and boil very slowly for half an hour. Put up in stone jars, cover with papers like jellies, or seal in cans. Mrs. J. H. Shegrer.
A whole-fruit preserve made by the old repeated-syrup method: the plums are never boiled hard until the last half hour, so they come out intact rather than as jam. Everything else follows from that.
- Why the four daysPouring hot syrup over the fruit and reboiling it daily draws sugar into the plums gradually and pulls water out, so the skins do not burst and the flesh does not collapse. Rushing it into a single boil gives you plum jam, which is fine but is not this recipe.
- Pricking the fruitPrick each plum several times to the pit with a needle or skewer. Unpricked plums trap steam and split, and syrup cannot penetrate.
- Equal weightsWeigh the fruit, then weigh out the same in sugar. For a manageable batch, 4 lb plums and 4 lb sugar, with about 1 to 1 1/2 cups water to start the syrup dissolving.
- "A thick syrup"Add only enough water to dissolve the sugar, then boil until it is clearly syrupy and clings to a spoon. Too much water and the four days of reboiling will still leave you with a thin, weeping preserve.
- Stone jarA glazed earthenware crock, used here only as a non-reactive holding vessel during the soaking days. A glass or stainless bowl does the same job; avoid bare aluminum or copper with acidic fruit standing overnight.
- The final boilHalf an hour at a bare simmer, skimming the foam. A hard rolling boil at this stage tears the skins apart, which is exactly what the previous days of patience were meant to prevent.
- Sealing"Cover with papers like jellies" in books of this period usually meant paper or cloth dipped in brandy laid on the surface, then tied over — a method that relies on very high sugar and a cool cellar, and one that molds readily in a modern kitchen. Ladle boiling hot into clean half-pint jars and process in a boiling-water bath instead; plums are acidic enough for it.
- Fruit choice and yieldFruit choice -- Firm, slightly underripe damsons or Italian prune plums hold their shape best; large soft dessert plums fall apart.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, at a moment when refined sugar had become cheap enough that a household could commit pound for pound of it to a crock of fruit. The multi-day syrup soak is much older than the book, a technique found in European confectionery manuals for keeping whole fruit whole, and the same principle underlies candied citrus peel and French fruits confits. Recipes like this one, signed with a contributor's name, are the backbone of the volume: it was assembled from the working notebooks of women in Marysville and elsewhere, which is why the instructions assume you already know what a thick syrup looks like and how a jelly is papered over.