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DAMSONS, PRESERVED (another way)
Prick the fruit, and place it in scalding water for about a minute, lift the fruit into a dry dish, and strew powdered sugar over it. Next day pour off the syrup, boil and skim it, pour it again over the fruit, and allow it to stand for a day or two. Boil the syrup once more, add it again to the fruit, and boil both together for a short time, taking care not to break the damsons. When ready, pour into jars, and when cold, add brandied papers, and close carefully. Half a pound of sugar is sufficient for each pound of fruit.
A slow, three-stage sugar preserve that keeps damsons whole rather than collapsing them into jam. The work is spread over three or four days, but almost none of it is active.
- The hinge: never let it boil hardThe hinge: keep the boiling gentle -- damson skins split easily once the syrup is moving hard, and burst fruit muddies the syrup. Every boiling of the syrup happens away from the fruit; only the final short boil brings the two together, which argues for a gentle simmer.
- Why prick the fruitA few pricks with a needle or fork let the hot syrup enter and the fruit's own juice escape without the skin bursting. Skip it and the damsons wrinkle and shrink instead of staying plump.
- Ratio and yieldHalf a pound of sugar per pound of fruit is light by modern standards; many current damson recipes use three-quarters to equal weight. Two pounds of damsons and one pound of sugar should fill roughly two 1-pint jars.
- Scalding water"Scalding" means water at or just off the boil; the original gives no temperature. A minute is enough to soften the skin's resistance; longer and the fruit starts to cook and slump.
- Drawing the syrupThere is no liquid in this recipe beyond what the sugar pulls out of the damsons overnight. Use a wide dish so the fruit sits in a single layer, and expect a surprisingly generous amount of deep red juice by morning.
- SkimmingThe scum that rises on the first boil is froth and debris from the fruit and sugar; removing it is what gives the finished syrup its clarity. A wide shallow pan makes this easier than a tall preserving pan.
- Brandied papersRounds of paper soaked in brandy, laid directly on the surface of the cooled preserve to discourage mould before reliably airtight lids were common. A modern equivalent is simply to fill clean hot jars and seal them properly.
- StorageAt this sugar level the preserve is not shelf-stable by current standards. Either process the filled jars in a boiling-water bath following a current tested procedure, or keep them refrigerated and use within a couple of months.
- Choosing the fruitUse damsons that are ripe but firm -- soft ones will not survive three handlings. Their high pectin and sharp acidity are the point; ordinary plums give a flabbier, sweeter result.
The damson takes its name from Damascus, and the small blue-black plum has been grown in Britain for centuries, valued less for eating raw -- it is astringent and stubbornly clinging to its stone -- than for what heat and sugar do to it. Cassell's gives more than one damson method because the fruit was a standard part of the autumn preserving round in Victorian households, ripening in September when the kitchen was already busy with the year's jams and bottled fruit. The technique here, repeatedly drawing off the syrup, boiling it alone and returning it to the fruit, is the classic way of concentrating a syrup without overcooking what sits in it, and the same staged method appears in period recipes for whole preserved greengages, apricots and cherries. Brandied papers were used as a seal before reliable screw-top jars: the spirit's alcohol suppressed surface mould in a preserve that, at this sugar level, could not fully protect itself.