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Damson, Solid
Skin, core, and quarter one pound and a quarter of good boiling apples, put them into a preserving-pan with one pound of damson-juice (extracted from the fruit by placing it in a cool oven at night, or setting it in a jar in hot water), boil them both together for half an hour, then add three-quarters of a pound of good pounded sugar, and after the sugar has dissolved boil for another ten minutes. If the apples are good, and the recipe carefully attended to, small moulds of this solid fruit will help to fill up successfully many vacancies on a supper-table.
A fruit "solid" is the thrifty cousin of damson cheese: apple pulp carries the flavour and the setting power, damson juice supplies the colour and acidity. The whole thing hinges on cooking it dry enough to hold a shape when turned out.
- Weights, translated1 lb 4 oz apples is roughly four medium cooking apples once peeled and cored; 1 lb of damson juice is a weight, not a volume, and comes to about 2 cups. Sugar is 12 oz, a little under 1¾ cups granulated.
- Extracting the juiceA "cool oven at night" would plausibly have meant the dying heat of a range; in a modern oven the lowest setting, somewhere in the region of 200-250F, for several hours does much the same. The jar-in-hot-water method is simpler: damsons in a covered heatproof jar set in a pan of simmering water for an hour or two, then strained without pressing so the juice stays clear.
- Boiling applesThis means a tart cooking apple that collapses to fluff — Bramley, or a Granny Smith at a pinch. A firm eating apple will hold its shape in quarters and never come together into a solid.
- Pounded sugarSugar sold in loaves had to be broken and pounded before use; plain granulated is the modern equivalent. Add it only after the fruit is fully soft, as sugar added early keeps the flesh from breaking down.
- The preserving-panUse the widest heavy nonreactive pan you have. Damson acid will pick up metallic flavours from bare aluminium or unlined copper, and a wide pan drives off water fast, which is what makes the mixture stiff rather than saucy.
- Judging the setAfter the final ten minutes the mixture should be thick enough that a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a channel that stays open for a second or two. If it still floods back, keep cooking and stir constantly — at this sugar concentration it scorches quickly.
- MouldingRinse small moulds or ramekins with cold water and do not dry them; the film of water lets the set fruit slip out cleanly. Chill several hours before turning out.
- Yield and keepingPerhaps 1½ lb depending how far it is reduced, enough for four to six small moulds. The sugar is well below jam proportions, so this is not a shelf-stable preserve — keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within a week or two.
"Solids" and "cheeses" belonged to the same family of stiff fruit pastes that English households made when a glut of orchard fruit had to be got into a form that could be turned out of a mould, sliced, and eaten with cream or with cold meat. Damsons hrough damdamascene to Damascus, the fruit having reached western Europe from the eastern Mediterranean \— are small, astringent and stubbornly clingstone, which is why so many recipes call for the juice alone rather than the pulp. Pairing that juice with apple is a piece of practical kitchen chemistry: cooking apples set firmly and taste of very little, so they bulk out and stiffen a fruit whose flavour is strong enough to spare. Cassell's frames the result as a filler for the supper table, the informal cold spread of the late Victorian household, where a row of small moulded shapes did duty between the more serious dishes.