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Wine-Sour Plums, to Preserve, Excellent
Pick off the stalks, weigh the plums, and take half their weight in loaf sugar pounded. Tear the skin at the seam with a pin, and put the fruit and the sugar, in alternate layers, into a large earthen jar. Cover the jar closely, and put it in the oven in a shallow tin of boiling water. Keep the water boiling under it. When the plums are soft, pour the syrup from them; boil it, pour it over the fruit, and leave them till cold. Do this several times until the skin looks hard and the plums clear. Let them stand a week, then take them up one by one with a spoon and put them into jars. Boil the syrup once more, and pour it over them. If there is not sufficient syrup to cover them, add more to it, made in the proportion of a pound of sugar to a tea-cupful of water. When the plums are cold, place brandied papers upon them, and tie a bladder over, to keep them airtight; otherwise, they will lose their colour. If stored in a cool dry place, plums thus preserved will keep for years. Time, about ten days. Wine-sours are plums peculiar to the North of England.
A long, low, patient preserve: the fruit is never boiled, only warmed in its own syrup over many days until it candies. Almost everything that can go wrong comes from rushing it.
- The hinge: heat the fruit, boil only the syrupThe plums sit in a covered jar over simmering water and never come to a boil themselves, which is why they keep their shape and skins. Only the drained syrup goes on the stove to be reduced and poured back hot.
- Wine-soursAn old sour cooking plum of the North of England, too acid to eat raw. Damsons are the closest widely available stand-in; small underripe Italian prune plums also work, though they are sweeter and the finished preserve will taste flatter.
- Loaf sugar, poundedLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; no pounding required.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; it only says to put the jar in the oven and to keep the water in the tin boiling under it. A low oven, in the region of 250-275F, will hold the water at a boil without driving it off quickly; top up with boiling water as it reduces.
- A tea-cupfulUsually reckoned at about a quarter-pint, roughly 5-6 fl oz, though Victorian usage varies. A pound of sugar to that much water gives a very heavy syrup, which is what covers the fruit properly.
- Tearing the skin at the seamThis is not decorative. A single pin-slit lets syrup in and steam out so the plums neither burst nor float dry on top.
- Brandied papers and bladderA disc of parchment or waxed paper soaked in brandy laid directly on the surface, then a sealing skin tied over the rim. Both are mould control. Modern practice is a hot, sterilised jar with a proper lid, still with the spirit-soaked disc if you like.
- KeepingThe sugar is only half the weight of the fruit, so this is not a fully saturated preserve on day one; the repeated syrup reductions are what get it there. If the skins never go hard and the fruit never turns clear, treat the result as a short-keeping compote and refrigerate it.
- Time and yieldTime -- About ten days start to finish, of which most is the week's standing time. The recipe gives no quantities, so scale the sugar to half the weight of whatever fruit you have.
Wine-sour is a genuine old northern English plum, associated particularly with Yorkshire, where it was grown less as dessert fruit than as something to preserve; it is generally described in nineteenth-century fruit lists as too sharp to eat from the tree. Cassell's flags it as "peculiar to the North of England" precisely because a London reader would not have met it, and the note tells you something about how regional the Victorian fruit trade still was in the 1870s and 1880s. The method itself is older than the book: slow candying in a covered jar set over water in a cooling oven was one common way to preserve whole fruit before reliable jam kettles and screw-top jars, and a bladder tied over the mouth was a familiar still-room seal. Sugar at half the weight of the fruit, boiled down again and again, does the work that pectin and a rolling boil do in a modern jam.