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Plums in Vinegar
Take three pounds of mussel plums, sound and ripe, and rub them with a soft cloth. Boil a pound of loaf sugar in a pint and a half of vinegar, with a dozen cloves, and a quarter of an ounce of stick cinnamon. Put in the plums, a few at a time, and let them simmer gently. As the skins crack, lift them carefully out, and put them on dishes to cool. When they are cold lay them on dishes to cool. When they are cold lay them in deep jar, and shake them to make them lie closely together. They ought not to be at all soft. Boil the vinegar and sugar a few minutes longer, then pour it out, and when it is cold strain it over the plums, which it ought to cover entirely. Leave the jar in a cool place for a week. At the end of that time strain off the syrup and boil it. If the plums are hard, pour the syrup hot over them; if soft, let it get cold first. Cover the jars in the usual way, and store in a cool place. If liked, half a pint of claret may be put with each pint of vinegar. These plums are excellent served with roast mutton.
A sweet vinegar pickle of the kind Victorian households kept on hand to cut through roast meat. The method is sound; the vocabulary and the vessel sizes need translating.
- The hinge: lift them the moment the skin splitsThe plums are meant to stay whole and firm; the recipe insists they "ought not to be at all soft," and returns to the point later in distinguishing hard plums from soft. Work in small batches at a bare simmer and pull each plum out with a slotted spoon as its skin cracks, or you will end up with sweet-sour jam.
- Mussel plumsAn old English plum name, generally understood to mean a smallish firm cooking plum of roughly damson or prune-plum character. Any firm, tart plum of that size will behave the same way; large soft dessert plums will not.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, sold in hard cones to be broken up. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, pound for pound.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half in this book is 30 imperial fluid ounces, about 850 ml or roughly 3½ US cups. A quarter ounce of stick cinnamon is roughly 7 g, or two to three whole quills.
- Vinegar strengthThe keeping quality depends entirely on the acid. Use a vinegar labelled at 5 per cent acidity — cider or malt suits the dish — and do not dilute it beyond the optional claret the recipe allows.
- A copying error in the text"Put them on dishes to cool. When they are cold lay them on dishes to cool" is a printer's repetition. Cool them once, then pack them into the jar.
- The second boiling, a week laterNot mere fussiness: drawing off the syrup and reboiling it drives off the water the fruit has given up, restoring the strength of the sugar-and-vinegar syrup, which is presumably why the step is there.
- "Cover the jars in the usual way"For a Victorian household that meant rounds of paper, a bladder or a waxed cloth tied over the mouth, and a cold larder. Modern practice is a water-bath process in proper preserving jars, or simply keeping the finished jars in the refrigerator and eating them within a couple of months.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of plums with their syrup will fill something in the region of two quarts, though the recipe gives no yield. The suggestion of roast mutton is the recipe's own; it would suit pork, duck, cold ham or a hard cheese equally.
Sweet vinegar pickles of whole fruit — plums, damsons, cherries, peaches, walnuts — were a fixture of the English store cupboard long before refrigeration, and the pickled walnut is the best-known survivor. The logic is the same as chutney or a fruit "catsup": sugar and acid together preserve, and the resulting sharpness answers the fattiness of roast mutton or cold ham at a time when a joint might be eaten over several days. It belongs to the household's late-summer work, when a glut of hard, slightly underripe fruit was worth more in a jar than on the table. The optional claret in the vinegar adds colour and softens the bite.