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WINE-SOURS, TO PRESERVE (a more expeditious method)
Skin and stone the plums, and boil them till soft. Put with them three-quarters of their weight in sugar, and stir them continuously till the syrup will set when a little is put upon a plate. Pour the jam into jars, and cover in the usual way. Store in a cool dry place. Time to boil the plums, three-quarters of an hour without sugar; about a quarter of an hour with sugar.
A plain plum jam at a slightly lean sugar ratio, written for a fruit most cooks no longer meet by name. The single thing to get right is the set test, since no thermometer figure is given.
- What a wine-sour isA very tart dark plum of the bullace and damson family, long grown in Yorkshire. Damsons are the closest substitute; any sharp, firm-fleshed plum will work, and firmly ripe rather than soft fruit gives a better set.
- Sugar proportionThree-quarters of the weight of the fruit in sugar; the recipe does not say whether the fruit is weighed before or after boiling. So 750 g sugar to 1 kg fruit. That is below the near-equal weights of most modern jam recipes, which means a softer set and a shorter keeping life once opened.
- Skinning and stoning rawSkinning raw plums is tedious. Many cooks now cook the fruit whole, then lift out the stones with a slotted spoon as they float free and sieve or leave the skins as preferred. If you follow the original and stone first, expect to lose a good deal of juice.
- The set testThe plate test is the hinge here. Chill two saucers in the freezer first, take the pan off the heat while testing, and look for a skin that wrinkles when pushed. On a thermometer this corresponds to about 105C / 220F.
- The 45-minute pre-boilBoiling the fruit three-quarters of an hour before sugar goes in is deliberate — it breaks down the flesh and draws out pectin from a fruit that is rich in it. Add a splash of water at the start so the pan does not catch.
- "Cover in the usual way"In period practice this meant a waxed paper disc on the hot surface and a covered top tied down with string. For keeping longer than a few weeks, use sterilised jars with two-piece or lug lids, filled hot to within 1 cm of the rim, and refrigerate after opening.
- YieldNot stated. Roughly 1 kg of stoned fruit with its sugar gives about 1.5 kg of jam.
Wine-sours are a local English plum — the name is generally traced to their sharp, wine-dark juice — associated particularly with the Vale of York, where they were grown in cottage gardens and hedgerows and valued precisely because they were too sour to eat raw. Fruit like this existed to be preserved: a household with a wine-sour tree had a glut in late summer and no way to keep it except sugar. Cassell's gives this version as "a more expeditious method", implying it sits beside a longer traditional one. That the shortcut merited its own entry says something about the kitchen it was written for.