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Greengages, to Preserve Dry
Take a pound of greengages, gathered on a dry day, before they are fully ripe. Leave the stalks untouched. Make a syrup, by boiling together a pound of loaf sugar with a quarter of a pint of water. Put the fruit into the syrup when boiling, and simmer for ten minutes; then lift each plum out singly, boil the syrup once more, and pour it over the plums. Repeat this for six days, boiling the plums four minutes each day. On the seventh day put the greengages on a sieve, and place them in a cool oven to dry. They should be kept in single rows, in boxes, with a sheet of white paper between each layer of plums. Probable cost of greengages, when plentiful, 6d. per quart.
A seven-day candying process of the sort that filled Victorian storerooms: the plums are steeped in progressively stronger syrup until they are dense with sugar, then dried. It needs almost no attention each day, but it does need all seven days.
- The hinge: gentle heat onlyThe daily boilings are meant to concentrate the syrup while the fruit slowly absorbs sugar. Once the plums are in, keep the pan at a bare simmer — a rolling boil splits the skins and you get jam with stalks in it.
- Fruit choiceUnderripe greengages are specified for good reason: they hold their shape and their acidity through repeated heating. Ripe, soft fruit collapses. The stalks are left on, and they would at least give you something to lift the plums by, which is the least damaging way to handle them.
- Quarter of a pintIn an English book of this date that is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. With a pound of sugar it makes a thick syrup from the start.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; no substitution or adjustment is required.
- Lifting the fruit outA slotted spoon or a skimmer, one plum at a time, into a shallow dish. The syrup is reboiled alone so it thickens without cooking the fruit further, then poured back over.
- A cool ovenRoughly 200-250F/95-120C, and the lower end is safer for drying; door propped ajar, for several hours until the surface is tacky rather than wet. A dehydrator at 130-140F does the same job overnight. Underdrying is the usual failure — sugared fruit that is still damp inside will mould in the box.
- StorageThe paper between layers stops the plums welding together. Keep them somewhere cool and genuinely dry; damp air will make the sugar weep and the surface sticky.
- YieldA pound of greengages gives roughly 15 to 20 candied plums, depending on size. The leftover syrup is worth keeping for puddings or soda water.
- The cost lineSixpence a quart was Cassell's guide to seasonal value, not part of the method. Greengages sold by volume rather than weight; a quart of them is roughly a pound and a quarter.
The greengage is a green-skinned dessert plum, a form of Prunus domestica long grown in France as the reine-claude, named for Claude of France; the English name is generally traced to the Gage family of Suffolk, who are said to have introduced it in the early eighteenth century and lost the original label in transit. Dry preserving of this kind — repeated short boilings in syrup over a week, then slow drying — was the standard domestic route to what a confectioner would sell as candied or crystallised fruit, and it appears in Cassell's alongside wet preserves because the two answered different needs: a jar of plums in syrup for the table, a box of dry ones for the sweet dish at the end of dinner or for Christmas. The method survives commercially in glacé fruit, where the syrup is still stepped up in strength over days for exactly the same reason: sugar has to enter the fruit slowly, or the cells collapse before they are saturated.