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Plums, Pickled Like Olives
Take some hard green plums which have been gathered before the stones have formed. Boil as much vinegar as will entirely cover them, with a table-spoonful of salt and half an ounce of mustard-seed to each pint of the liquid. Pour it hot over the fruit. Let it stand until the next day, then drain it off, boil again, and repeat the performance. When the plums are quite cold, put them into bottles, cover with vinegar, tie up securely, and store in a cool, dry place.
A vinegar pickle of unripe plums intended to stand in for olives on the table. The whole thing hinges on the fruit being immature enough that the stone has not hardened, and on repeated hot pours rather than boiling the plums.
- The fruitYou need plums picked while the flesh is still solid green and the stone is soft and unformed — in temperate northern climates that usually falls around late May to June, before shops stock them. Windfalls or thinnings from a garden tree are the practical source; a firm underripe supermarket plum with a hard stone will not behave the same way.
- Why the fruit is never boiledThe plums stay raw in the jar and only receive hot vinegar poured over them. Simmering them would split the skins and collapse the flesh into jam; the likely point of the repeated hot pour is to draw out moisture and firm the fruit gradually while keeping it whole.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity — ordinary distilled white, cider, or the malt vinegar a Victorian English kitchen would have reached for. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or unlabelled artisan vinegar, since the acid is the only thing preserving the fruit.
- MeasuresHalf an ounce of mustard seed per pint is about a tablespoon and a half. The pint is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so scale by 2½ cups per imperial pint if you are working in American measures.
- "Repeat the performance"Drain the vinegar off, bring it back to a boil, and pour it over the fruit again. The wording is ambiguous: it may mean a second pour only, or a further round on a third day. Expect some loss to evaporation each time; top up with fresh vinegar rather than letting the fruit sit uncovered.
- Storage as written"Tie up securely" most likely means a cloth, paper or bladder cover over the jar mouth, not a modern seal. Bottled this way the keeping time is limited and unpredictable; a screw-top jar in the refrigerator is the sensible modern equivalent, and the fruit must stay fully submerged in vinegar the entire time.
- Waiting time and yieldThe recipe gives no maturing period and no quantities. Green plum pickles are generally harsh at first and mellow over some weeks; as a rough guide, about two pounds of fruit will fill a quart jar.
- How it actually tastesSalty, sharp and faintly mustardy rather than genuinely olive-like. Treat it as a relish with cold meat, cheese or a chop, not as a swap for olives in a Mediterranean dish.
Mock olives appear repeatedly in English cookery writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when imported olives were expensive enough to sit firmly in the luxury column. Cookery books of the period are full of substitutions along these lines ‑ green plums, unripe walnuts, nasturtium seeds pickled as capers, elder shoots pickled as bamboo ‑ all built on the observation that a hard green fruit held in strong vinegar and salt develops a savoury bite and a firm bite quite unlike its fresh self. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s for a broad middle-class readership, collects such economies without comment; a household with a plum tree could produce something to put beside the cheese for the cost of a pint of vinegar. The technique is also a reminder of how much fruit was harvested green: thinning a tree in June was ordinary practice, and the thinnings were said to be worth using rather than throwing away.