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Plum Preserves
Prick the plums with a coarse needle. Allow a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit and a cup of water to each pound of sugar. Melt the sugar in the water, let boil, and skim; then add the plums, a few at a time, and let boil very gently about twenty mintues. Remove the fruit to jars with a skimmer and let the syrup boil. Strain enough juice from the plums in the cans back into the saucepan, to have the jar filled to three fourths its height with plums.
Boil the syrup until quite thick, then use to fill the jars.
A straightforward whole-fruit preserve in the old proportion of equal weights of fruit and sugar. The recipe assumes you know how to fill and seal jars, so that step is missing entirely.
- Prick every plumThis is the hinge. Unpricked plums split and slip their skins in hot syrup, leaving you with a pot of loose skins and pulp. Two or three deep punctures with a larding needle or a metal skewer let the syrup in and the steam out so the fruit stays whole.
- The proportionsA pound of sugar per pound of fruit and a cup of water per pound of sugar. For 3 lb of plums that is 3 lb (about 6 3/4 cups) sugar and 3 cups water. The high sugar is what preserves the fruit; cutting it substantially gives you stewed plums, not preserves.
- "Boil very gently"A bare shiver on the surface, not a rolling boil. Twenty minutes at a hard boil will burst the fruit no matter how carefully you pricked it. Add the plums a few at a time, as directed, so the syrup never drops out of the simmer.
- Choose firm fruitDamsons, greengages, Italian prunes or any small firm plum hold up. Large soft dessert plums collapse. Slightly underripe fruit carries more pectin and more acid, which helps the syrup body.
- How thick is "quite thick"The syrup is reduced enough at about 220-222F on a thermometer, or when a spoonful sheets off the edge rather than running in drops. It will thicken further as it cools, so stop short of a jam consistency.
- The two-stage fillingThe fruit goes into the jars first, then juice is drained back to the pan and boiled down and returned. This gives whole plums in a heavy syrup rather than fruit floating in thin liquid. Work with hot jars so they do not crack.
- Sealing is not covered hereThe recipe stops at filling, which reflects the period practice of simply capping hot jars. Current guidance is to leave headspace and process the sealed jars in a boiling-water bath for the time specified by an up-to-date preserving source for your jar size and altitude; open-kettle filling alone is no longer considered a reliable seal.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. Three pounds of plums with its sugar and syrup will fill on the order of four to five pints, depending on how tightly the fruit packs and how far the syrup is reduced.
Preserving whole fruit in an equal weight of sugar is one of the oldest rules in English and American housekeeping, predating any reliable canning technology: the sugar itself, at that concentration, binds enough water that molds and yeasts cannot easily grow. Books of this kind sit at the turn between the old sugar-heavy preserve and the newer processed pack, and they often print both without much comment on which is which. Plums were a natural candidate for the whole-fruit treatment because their skins hold the shape of the fruit if they are pricked, and because the tart varieties then grown in home orchards -- damsons among them -- have the acid and pectin to set a syrup without help. Skimming the melting sugar was routine in older confectionery practice, when sugar was less thoroughly refined and scum did rise.