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Plum Butter with Honey
Add a little boiling water, - just enough to avoid burning, - to plums; let cook slowly till softened and press through a colander.
For two quarts of purée take one quart of honey (or half honey and half sugar). Heat the purée to the boiling point, add the honey, and let cook until thick.
A two-ingredient fruit butter that depends entirely on evaporation rather than added pectin. The whole job is reducing the purée without scorching it.
- The hinge: low heat and constant stirringOnce the honey is in, the mixture spits and catches easily on the bottom of the pan. Use the widest heavy-bottomed pot you have, keep the heat low, and stir across the base with a flat wooden spatula rather than a spoon.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts of purée is 8 cups; a quart of honey is 4 cups, about 3 lb. That is a very sweet butter by current taste. Some cooks today reduce the sweetener, accepting a softer set and a shorter shelf life.
- How much fruitThe recipe starts from the purée, not the fruit. Roughly 5 to 6 lb of prune or damson plums yields 2 quarts of thick purée after cooking down and sieving.
- Skins, stones and the colanderCook the plums whole and unpitted, then press through a colander or food mill; the stones and skins stay behind. A food mill with a medium plate does this faster than a colander and a spoon. Do not use a blender, which pulverizes skin and gives a dull color.
- Honey behaves differently from sugarHoney browns at a lower temperature than sucrose and carries its own flavor. Buckwheat or chestnut honey will dominate the plums; a mild clover or acacia honey will not. The half-honey, half-sugar version in the parenthesis is the safer choice for a clean plum flavor.
- Time and the doneness testExpect 45 minutes to 2 hours of slow cooking depending on pan width. It is thick enough when a spoonful dropped on a chilled plate holds a mound and no rim of liquid weeps out, or when a spoon drawn across the pot bottom leaves a track that closes slowly.
- Yield and keepingAbout 5 to 6 half-pint jars. The recipe gives no instructions for putting the butter up; current practice is to fill clean hot half-pint jars to a quarter inch of the top and process in a boiling-water bath, following an up-to-date tested chart for your altitude. Unprocessed, it belongs in the refrigerator.
Fruit butters are the thrifty end of preserving: no straining for clarity, no pectin test, no worry about a jelly that fails to set, just fruit cooked down until the water is gone and the sugar concentration does the preserving. Plums, cheap and abundant in late summer, were a standard candidate, as were apples and quinces. The honey version reflects an interest in honey as a household sweetener — partly economy, partly enthusiasm for foods regarded as less refined than white sugar. Here the honey substitution is offered as an alternative in the parenthesis rather than as a separate recipe.