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Damson Drops
Pick the stalks from some damsons, wipe them and put them into a moderately-heated oven to bake, but do not let them burst. When sufficiently done take off the skins, and remove the stones; add some crushed lump sugar to the pulp, and mix until it is a stiff paste. Drop the mixture upon paper in small quantities of uniform size, and put them into a moderately heated oven to dry. When sufficiently dry, take them out and turn them down over a sieve, when, by damping the paper, the drops will fall on the sieve, and must be again hardened in a cool oven. Store them in a box with paper between each layer. They will keep a long time in this way if the air be excluded from them.
A Victorian fruit sweetmeat: baked damson pulp stiffened with sugar and dried in slow stages. The whole thing hinges on drying rather than cooking, so the oven should be far cooler than "moderately heated" suggests to a modern reader.
- Oven temperaturesVictorian "moderately heated" is usually read as somewhere around 300-350F, but since the damsons must soften without bursting, err at the low end and watch them. For drying the drops, use the lowest setting your oven offers, perhaps 150-175F, with the door propped ajar; "a cool oven" for the final hardening suggests little more than residual heat. A dehydrator at around 135F is easier to control.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was cane sugar broken from a cone or moulded block; crushed, it is simply granulated sugar. Ordinary caster sugar dissolves into the pulp faster and gives a smoother paste.
- ProportionsNone are given, which is normal for the period. Work by feel: roughly equal weights of drained pulp and sugar produces a paste stiff enough to hold a shape. Damsons are very tart, so noticeably less sugar than that will taste sharp.
- Getting the pulp dry enoughA likely failure point. If the baked pulp is wet, the drops will spread on the paper and never harden. Let the pulp sit in a sieve to drain, or dry it gently in the pan over low heat before adding sugar.
- PaperThe recipe damps the paper to release the drops onto the sieve. Baking parchment or a silicone mat releases dried drops cleanly with no water at all, which avoids reintroducing moisture.
- TimingExpect several hours of drying, not minutes, and turn the drops once they are firm enough to lift. They are done when the surface is dry and slightly leathery and the centre no longer feels tacky.
- Yield and storageYield depends on how large you make the drops. An airtight tin with parchment between the layers, kept cool and dark, is the modern equivalent of the recipe's box; the original claims they keep a long time if air is excluded. Any softening or beading of syrup means they were underdried.
Damsons are a small, astringent plum long grown in British hedgerows and orchards, and their high acidity and pectin made them a mainstay of the Victorian preserving cupboard: damson cheese, damson jam, damson gin. Drops of this kind belong to the older tradition of fruit "pastes" and "cakes" — concentrated fruit and sugar dried slowly until it would keep through the winter — a family that includes quince paste and the fruit leathers still made across southern Europe. The technique matters more than the fruit: any tart, firm-fleshed plum behaves the same way. The reliance on a cool oven for hardening is a reminder that this was food made to the rhythms of a coal fire's working day rather than to a set time and temperature.