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Plum Marmalade
Pick the stalks from the fruit, weigh it, gash it with a silver knife, and put it into a preserving-pan. Let it simmer gently until the fruit is quite soft, lift out the stones as they rise to the surface, and keep the plums well stirred to prevent their burning. Press the pulp through a coarse sieve. Mix with it three-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pint of pulp, and boil gently, stirring constantly till the marmalade is very thick. Pour the marmalade into jelly-pots, and cover closely.
A straightforward fruit butter under an older name. The whole method turns on cooking the pulp down far enough before it goes into jars.
- What "marmalade" means hereIn Victorian usage marmalade is any fruit boiled to a thick, spreadable paste, not specifically a citrus preserve with peel. This is closer to what an American cook would call plum butter.
- The silver knifeSilver was specified because carbon-steel blades reacted with fruit acid and blackened both the blade and the cut fruit. Stainless steel does the same job with no discolouration, and the gashing is only to help the plums collapse and release their stones.
- Sugar ratioThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pint of pulp is roughly 1 2/3 cups sugar per 2 cups pulp by volume. That is a lower-sugar preserve than a jam, which is part of why it must be cooked thick rather than relying on set.
- Preserving-panPreserving-pans of the period were typically copper or brass. Any wide heavy-bottomed stainless or enamelled pan works; width matters more than material because evaporation is what thickens this.
- The hinge: know when it is thick enoughWithout pectin testing, judge by drag. When a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a channel that does not immediately flood back, it is done; thermometer readings for this stage vary, so go by the channel rather than a fixed number. Stir constantly at that stage, since a sugar-heavy pulp scorches easily on the base.
- StonesSkimming stones from the surface is unreliable with clingstone varieties. Halving and pitting the plums first, or passing the cooked pulp through a food mill, saves a lot of picking.
- SievingA coarse sieve leaves some skin behind and gives colour and body. A food mill fitted with a coarse plate reproduces this; a fine-mesh strainer will strip too much and cost you yield.
- Jars and keeping"Cover closely" meant a paper or waxed disc and a tied cover, and such pots were kept in a cold larder and eaten within months. For shelf storage today, fill hot sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath to a current tested time; otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- YieldThe original gives none, and the finished quantity depends entirely on how far you reduce the pulp.
Plums were an abundant British orchard fruit in late summer, ripening all at once and bruising fast, so a household with a damson or Victoria tree needed a way to use a glut quickly. Reducing the fruit to a stiff paste rather than a jam demanded less sugar and tolerated fruit too soft or too ripe to hold its shape. The word marmalade comes through French from the Portuguese marmelada, a solid quince paste, and for centuries in English it kept that broader sense of any fruit boiled stiff; the narrowing of the term to orange preserves is largely a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and books of this period still use the older meaning freely. The insistence on a silver knife is a practical note from the era of carbon-steel blades rather than an affectation of gentility.