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Plum Possibilities
Plum Jelly. Take the plums before they are wholly ripe. Cover with boiling water and let them boil slowly until they are thoroughly cooked. Then drain in a jelly bag. Use an equal measure of sugar and plum juice and finish like other jellies.
Plum Marmalade. Remove the plums from the jelly bag before the juice is entirely drained and put them through a wire strainer. Sweeten to taste and simmer until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved.
I quart apple juice 2 green peppers 3 chili peppers
Two recipes worked from one batch of fruit: the drained juice becomes jelly, the pulp left in the bag becomes marmalade. The instructions assume you already know how jelly behaves, so the important numbers are missing.
- The hinge: underripe fruit"Before they are wholly ripe" is not a stylistic preference. Pectin and acid both peak just before full ripeness and fall off sharply afterward, so dead-ripe plums give juice that will not set at a 1:1 sugar ratio. A mix of firm, barely-blushing fruit with a few ripe ones is the traditional compromise.
- "Finish like other jellies"Boil the juice and sugar hard and test for the set: 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or 8F above the temperature at which water boils in your kitchen. The older test is the sheet or flake — the last drops leaving a cold spoon run together and fall in a sheet rather than as separate drops.
- The jelly bagLet it drip. Squeezing or twisting forces fine pulp through and gives cloudy jelly, which is the whole reason for the bag. Several hours, often overnight, is usual, and the recipe's instruction to pull the pulp out early is a deliberate trade of a little juice for better marmalade.
- Measure by volume, not weight"An equal measure of sugar and plum juice" means cup for cup, roughly 7 oz of granulated sugar per cup of juice. Measure the juice after straining, since the yield varies enormously with how juicy the plums were.
- No commercial pectinThis is a long-boil jelly that relies on the fruit's own pectin. Do not add liquid or powdered pectin to it — those products are formulated for shorter boils and different sugar ratios, and the result is unpredictable.
- The marmalade needs more cooking than it says"Simmer until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved" produces a loose, wet preserve with too much free water to keep. Cook it down until a spoon drawn through the bottom of the pan leaves a track, and treat it as a refrigerator preserve to be eaten within a few weeks unless you process it properly.
- SealingThe book's era sealed jelly under melted paraffin. Current practice is a boiling-water bath in half-pint jars with two-piece lids, 5 to 10 minutes depending on altitude; consult a current canning guide for the times. Paraffin seals fail invisibly and let mold in.
- The stray lines at the end"1 quart apple juice, 2 green peppers, 3 chili peppers" belongs to a neighbouring recipe — almost certainly a pepper jelly — and has nothing to do with the plums. Ignore it.
- YieldImpossible to state, since the recipe covers the fruit with an unmeasured quantity of boiling water; measure the strained juice and match it cup for cup with sugar.
Plums are high in both pectin and acid and set reliably at a plain 1:1 sugar ratio, which is why they appear so often in home preserving books written before commercial pectin was in general use. Recipes of this type are built on the principle of using the whole fruit twice — the clear juice for the jelly, the leftover pulp pushed through a sieve for the coarser marmalade. The stray pepper-jelly ingredients stranded at the foot of this page suggest how densely these books were set, several recipes to a column, with little space given to explanation.