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Wild Plum Jelly
We have had no experience in making jelly of wild plums, but have made it most successfully from damson plums, also from green gage plums without the use of crab apples. In making these jellies, we used little water, less than in making apple jelly. Boil the fruit with the water until it is soft; drain and press out the juice or make several "extractions." Measure, heat to the boiling point quickly, then boil rapidly ten minutes; add a pound of sugar (a pint) for each pint of juice and let boil until it jellies. 2 quarts currants I quart strawberries 1 pint raspberries
A pectin-free jelly method from the era before commercial pectin, written as guidance rather than a fixed formula. The hinge is judging the set by eye, since the recipe gives no temperature and no timing after the sugar goes in.
- Judge the set, not the clock"Boil until it jellies" means a sheet or flake test: dip a cold metal spoon, lift it sideways, and look for the syrup to run off in a single sheet rather than in drops. On a thermometer this is 220F at sea level, 2F lower for each 1,000 feet of elevation.
- Sugar by weight or volumeA pound of granulated sugar measures closer to 2 1/4 cups than the flat pint the recipe equates it with; 'a pint is a pound' was a common working rule for sugar in period American books. Weigh it at 1 lb per pint (2 cups) of juice and the proportion behaves as intended.
- "Extractions"Cooking the drained pulp a second time with a little more water and straining again. Second and third extractions are thinner in flavor and pectin, so keep them separate and test each batch rather than pooling them.
- Why so little waterPlums are more acidic than apples and give up their juice readily, so they need only enough water to keep them from scorching before they collapse; the recipe does not say how much, only 'less than in making apple jelly.' Excess water means a longer boil and a duller flavor.
- Wild plums need no crab applesThe author's point about damsons and greengages holds doubly for wild plums (Prunus americana and its relatives), which are very high in both pectin and acid. Slightly underripe fruit sets more reliably than fully ripe.
- StrainingPressing the pulp gives more yield but a cloudier jelly; hanging it in a jelly bag to drip gives greater clarity at the cost of yield. Choose which matters more.
- SkimThe rapid ten-minute boil of the plain juice throws a heavy scum. Take it off before the sugar goes in, or it will be trapped as cloudiness in the finished jars.
- SealingThe recipe gives no sealing instructions. Paraffin, once common for jellies, is no longer recommended: fill sterilized half-pint jars to within a quarter inch of the top, apply two-piece lids, and process five minutes in boiling water.
- Yield, and the stray lineExpect roughly one cup of jelly per cup of juice plus sugar, so about four half-pints from a quart of juice. The fruit list at the end (currants, strawberries, raspberries) belongs to a different recipe and has nothing to do with the plums.
Wild plums were one of the few native American fruits that needed no improvement to make good jelly, and they appear frequently in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century preserving books precisely because they are acidic and pectin-rich enough to set on their own. Commercial liquid pectin reached home kitchens in the 1910s, with powdered pectin following later, so before that a cook either chose fruit with pectin of its own or borrowed some -- which is the context in which crab apples are mentioned here and then dismissed. The candor of the opening line, admitting no direct experience with the fruit named in the title, is striking. The damson and greengage stand in as vouched-for substitutes, both old European varieties that were more common in American orchards and markets then than now.