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Plum and Pear Jam, Without Sugar
Take half a peck of ripe pears, and another of ripe plums. Peel and stone them. Pour a cupful of good cider into a preserving-pan with the fruit, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered cloves. Let the mixture boil gently, with incessant stirring, until it is thick and smooth, and be very careful that it does not burn to the bottom of the pan. Pour it into jars, cover with brandied paper and bladder, and store in a cool dry place. Time, about two hours.
A Victorian fruit butter rather than a jam in the modern sense: no sugar, no pectin, no measured processing, and a seal that belongs to a world of cool stone larders. The cooking is straightforward; the storage instruction is the part that has not survived.
- The seal is the problemBrandied paper laid on the surface with a pig's bladder tied over the jar mouth is not an airtight seal and involves no heat processing. It relied on alcohol vapour and a cold larder to hold back mould and yeast, and it failed often enough that period cookbooks tell you to skim and re-boil spoiled pots.
- No sugar means no preservativeSugar in a conventional jam ties up water and makes the jar hostile to microbial growth. Strip it out and the only defences left are acidity and cold. Cooked pear pulp sits near the upper edge of the high-acid range, so an unsweetened, unprocessed, room-temperature jar is not a preserve you should build a winter around. A current tested recipe with specified quantities, headspace and boiling-water-bath times should be used instead.
- Half a peckA peck is two dry gallons, so half a peck of fruit is somewhere around 6 to 7 lb depending on the fruit. The recipe therefore starts from something on the order of 12 lb of fruit before peeling and stoning, which is a very large preserving-pan indeed by modern standards.
- CiderIn a British book of this date "good cider" means fermented cider, not the sweet unfiltered apple juice sold under that name in North America. Its acidity was part of the point.
- A quarter ounce of clovesThat is about 7 g, roughly a tablespoon of ground cloves for the whole batch, which is still assertive by current taste.
- Two hours of stirringThe time is honest: unsweetened pulp scorches readily because there is no syrup to carry heat evenly, and once the bottom catches, the burnt note runs through the entire pan. "Incessant stirring" is the literal requirement, not a flourish.
- What the finished thing isThe result is closer to an apple-butter or German Pflaumenmus than a set jam. It thickens by evaporation, not by pectin gelling, so it will never sheet off a spoon in the way a sugared jam does.
Sugarless fruit butters like this one are the frugal end of the Victorian preserving repertoire. Sugar was cheap enough by the 1890s for jam to be a working-class staple, but a cook with a heavy crop of windfall pears and plums and no wish to buy several pounds of sugar could still reduce the fruit to a keeping paste by long boiling alone, the same principle behind Central European plum mus and American apple butter, where the orchard glut supplies both bulk and acidity. The finishing instruction places the entry before screw-band jars and reliable rubber rings became household items: paper wetted with brandy laid on the surface, then a dried bladder tied over the rim and left to shrink tight as it dried, was the standard domestic closure.