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Plums, Preserved Dry
Divide them, take out the stones, and put the plums into a syrup made with half the weight of the fruit in sugar boiled with as much water as will dissolve it. Keep the plums covered with the syrup, and let them simmer very gently until they are tender without losing their shape. Lift the pan off the fire, and let the fruit stand in the syrup until the next day. Strain the syrup, boil it up with more sugar, so that there may be an equal weight of sugar and fruit, and let it boil almost to candy. Pour it out, and let it get cold. Put it back into the pan with the fruit. Let it simmer gently for a few minutes until the plums are quite soft. Let them remain in the syrup for three days, drain them, and spread them singly on dishes to dry. Time, five days. Or, put the plums whole into a syrup made with their weight in sugar and as much water as will dissolve the sugar. Let them boil gently for about twenty minutes, then let them remain in the syrup until the juice flows freely, and boil them a second time. Lift out the plums carefully, one by one, put them into deep jars, and pour the syrup over them. Leave them until the next day, drain them, and spread them singly on dishes to dry. Or, take plums which are fully grown but not ripe; prick them, put them into a pan of cold water, and let them remain until it is on the point of boiling. Let them cool, and drain them in a sieve. Take as many pounds of sugar as there are of fruit, and boil it to a strong syrup with as much water as will dissolve it. Put the plums in, and boil them gently for twenty minutes. The next day boil them again until the sugar is ready to candy. Pour the plums into deep jars, and let them stand all night in a cool oven. Let them get cold, then lift them out, and spread them singly on dishes to dry.
Three variations on candied plums, all working the same way: the fruit sits in progressively stronger sugar syrup until sugar has replaced most of its water, then it is dried. The hinge is patience at low heat — any brisk boil bursts the skins and you end up with jam.
- Sugar ratiosThe first method starts at half the fruit's weight in sugar and finishes at equal weight; the second and third start at equal weight. Weigh the prepared fruit after stoning and work from that number, not from the whole plums.
- "As much water as will dissolve it"Roughly 1 cup water per 2 lb sugar is enough to get a syrup going over gentle heat. Err on the low side — excess water only has to be boiled off again.
- "Boil almost to candy"I.e. stopping short of the full candy stage, probably somewhere in the hard-ball to soft-crack region, around 250-290F on a sugar thermometer. Push past it and the syrup is liable to set glassy and crack when cold rather than coating the fruit.
- "A cool oven"In nineteenth-century usage this generally means something in the region of 200-250F, the residual heat of a range after the day's cooking; the book itself gives no figure. A modern oven at its lowest setting, or 170F with the door propped, does the same job.
- The drying stageSpread the drained plums on racks, not solid dishes, so air reaches underneath, and turn them daily. In a warm dry room this takes two to four days; a dehydrator at 135F does it in eight to twelve hours. They are ready when tacky but not wet, with no syrup weeping out.
- Choice of plumsThe third method's "fully grown but not ripe" fruit is the reliable one — firm-fleshed varieties such as damsons, greengages or Italian prunes hold their shape. Soft dessert plums collapse in the first boil.
- Pricking and blanchingPricking the skins lets syrup in and stops them splitting. The near-boiling water bath in the third method softens the skin just enough for the sugar to penetrate; do not let it actually boil.
- StorageOnce fully dry, layer with greaseproof paper in an airtight tin and keep somewhere cool. Under-dried fruit moulds within weeks — if any piece is still damp at the centre, return the whole batch to the drying rack.
- Yield and timeTwo pounds of plums with their sugar gives roughly 1 to 1.25 lb of finished dried fruit. The five days quoted is mostly waiting; hands-on work amounts to perhaps an hour spread across the week.
Drying fruit in sugar was one of the routes a Victorian household used to keep plums beyond their few weeks in season, and the technique long predates the book -- English confectioners had been making "suckets" and dry preserves this way since the sixteenth century, when sugar was still costly enough that the finished sweetmeats counted as banquet fare. The slow escalation of syrup strength over several days is not fussiness: sugar drawn into the fruit too quickly makes the cells collapse and the plum shrivel, so the confectioner raises the concentration in stages and lets the fruit equilibrate overnight between each. The result is the ancestor of the glace fruit still sold at Christmas, and of the candied peel that goes into cakes.