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Pickles, Sweet American
Take seven pounds of damsons, four pounds of pounded loaf sugar, an ounce of stick cinnamon, an ounce of cloves, and a pint of vinegar. Lay the fruit and the other dry ingredients, in layers, in a deep stone jar, and pour the vinegar over all. Put the jar into a large pan of boiling water, and keep boiling until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved and the juice of the fruit extracted, then put the jar in a cool place. The next day drain off the syrup, boil it, and pour it over the fruit: repeat this process six or seven successive days until the skin looks hard and the plums clear. Let the preparation stand a week, then take the plums out one by one, place them in jars, boil the syrup, and fill up the jars with it. When cold, put brandy-papers over, and tie a bladder on the top to keep the air out, or the pickles will lose their colour. Pears, apples, peaches, and cherries can all be pickles in this way, and will be found delicious. A little cochineal in a bag dropped in the jar will improve the colour greatly. If stored in a dry place, they will keep six or seven years. Time, three weeks. Cost varies nearly every year.
This is a nineteenth-century sweet pickle worked by repeated syrup-boiling rather than by a measured, processed pack. The vocabulary and the vessels are worth decoding, but the preserving method itself is not one to reproduce; use a current tested recipe for sweet pickled fruit.
- Why the seal failsA bladder tied over the mouth of a jar and a disc of brandy-soaked paper on the surface were common closures in the period, and they work by drying tight and by the surface alcohol discouraging mould. Neither creates a vacuum nor a sterile barrier, and neither is a substitute for a processed, sealed jar. The claim that the pickles will keep six or seven years in a dry place assumes cool storage and regular inspection.
- Acid is not measured or controlledOne pint of vinegar to seven pounds of fruit is a small proportion, and the vinegar's strength is never stated — Victorian household vinegar varied widely. Damsons are acidic, and the syrup concentrates over the week of boiling, but nothing in the recipe tells you the finished pH, and safe shelf-stable pickling depends on knowing it.
- The water-bath jar is not a cannerStanding a stone jar in a pan of boiling water heats the contents gently to draw the juice; it is an extraction step, not a sterilising process. After a week's standing the fruit is packed and covered with reboiled syrup, but the jar is only closed once cold, which is the opposite of modern practice.
- DamsonsSmall, tart, blue-black plums with a clinging stone, still grown in Britain and worth seeking out at farmers' markets in early autumn. They are much more astringent than a dessert plum, which is why they take four pounds of sugar to seven of fruit.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold as a hard cone and broken up with sugar nippers, then pounded in a mortar — hence "pounded." Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Stick cinnamon and cloves by weightAn ounce of each is a substantial amount of whole spice, roughly a small handful of cinnamon quills and something under a third of a cup of cloves. Recipes of this kind commonly weigh whole spices rather than counting them; here they are left behind in the syrup rather than eaten.
- CochinealA red dye made from dried scale insects, sold to Victorian cooks as a colouring for confectionery and preserves. It is still a legal food colour, usually labelled carmine or E120, but it is decorative only here and adds nothing to the keeping.
- "Brandy-papers"Rounds of paper cut to the jar's diameter and dipped in brandy, laid directly on the fruit. The same trick appears in period jam and jelly recipes.
Sweet pickled fruit sits on the line between preserve and condiment, and the style of this one — fruit steeped in a spiced sugar-and-vinegar syrup, poured off and reboiled day after day — was associated in Britain with American housekeeping, where spiced peaches, pickled pears and sweet watermelon rind were long-established relishes for cold meat. The repeated draining and reboiling is not decoration: each cycle drives water out of the syrup and drives sugar into the fruit, which is why the recipe tells you to stop when the skins look hard and the plums clear, and why it budgets three weeks. That the entry closes with "cost varies nearly every year" is a reminder of what this dictionary was for — a household reference written for cooks buying seasonal fruit at unpredictable prices, with no expectation that a printed figure would hold.