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Plum Buds, to Pickle
Throw the buds into plenty of hot salted water, and let them simmer gently until they are soft. Strain the liquid from them, and let them get quite cold. Boil as much white-wine vinegar as will cover them, and flavour according to taste with mace and white pepper. Pour the liquid over the buds, and let them lie in it eight or nine days. Afterwards boil them in the vinegar until they turn green. Pour them into bottles, and when cold cover closely, and store for use. Probable cost uncertain, plum buds being seldom offered for sale.
This belongs to a family of Victorian caper substitutes made from unopened flower buds, and it is one of the entries in Cassell's that has not aged into anything a modern cook should attempt. The problems are in the raw material and in the greening step, not in the technique.
- The buds themselvesPlum buds are the flower buds of Prunus domestica. Leaves, bark and seeds of Prunus species carry cyanogenic glycosides, which release hydrogen cyanide when the tissue is crushed or wetted. How much, if any, is present in unopened flower buds is not well documented, and there is no domestic way to know what you have.
- "Until they turn green"Boiled vinegar does not turn a soft, salt-simmered bud green on its own. Nineteenth-century greening was commonly done by boiling pickles in a copper or brass pan, where the acid dissolves copper into the liquid and fixes a bright colour. The instruction here appears to assume something of that kind.
- Copper acetateThe green produced that way is copper salt in solution, which is what makes the pickle a poison rather than a preserve. Deliberate copper greening of pickles, gherkins and preserved fruit was a recognised adulteration scandal in Britain through the middle of the nineteenth century and was legislated against; it is not a technique with a safe modern equivalent.
- No measured acidityEven setting the plant material aside, the method gives no vinegar strength, no ratio and no processing time. It relies on an eight- or nine-day steep in cold spiced vinegar followed by a second boil, bottling, and covering only once cold. That is not adequate documentation for shelf-stable preserving now.
- If you want the pickled-bud flavourThe same book's era pickled nasturtium buds, broom buds and green elder shoots as caper substitutes, and nasturtium buds in particular are still made this way. Use a current, tested pickling recipe for those rather than adapting this one.
- On the closing line"Probable cost uncertain, plum buds being seldom offered for sale" suggests the compiler treated this as a home improvisation rather than a marketed ingredient. Cassell's gives a probable cost for most of its recipes; where it declines to, the ingredient was evidently already unusual.
Pickled buds filled a real gap in the British larder. True capers are the unopened flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and imported capers were expensive enough that English cookery books offered domestic stand-ins: nasturtium seeds and buds, broom buds, marsh marigold buds, green elder shoots, salted and steeped in spiced vinegar to mimic the sharp, resinous pop of the real thing in a sauce for boiled mutton. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for a mass Victorian readership, gathered up older receipts of this kind, and the plum bud entry reads more like something carried forward from earlier practice than tested in the editorial kitchen. Fixing a vivid colour by boiling in copper or brass was a known commercial practice for pickles and preserved fruit into the nineteenth century, and adulteration of the food supply was the subject of sustained public argument in the 1850s and 1860s, when chemists such as Arthur Hill Hassall documented it. That a domestic dictionary could still print the step without comment says a good deal about how slowly that knowledge reached the household shelf.