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Damson Plum Jam
Wash, halve, and pit the damsons, barely cover with water and cook till skins break, when add pound for pound of sugar to the fruit and juice and cook down till thick. For marmalade cook with the stones, putting through a sieve or colander to remove pits when fruit is soft, then cooking fifteen minutes with the sugar.
Two methods in one short paragraph: a halved-and-pitted jam, and a sieved "marmalade" cooked with the stones in. Damsons are high in both pectin and acid, so the set is nearly automatic — the risk is overcooking rather than a loose jam.
- Pound for poundEqual weights of sugar and fruit. The recipe adds the sugar to the cooked fruit and juice and does not say at what stage the fruit is weighed. A high sugar ratio is what makes the preserve keep; cutting it substantially gives a softer, more perishable product.
- Damsons clingThe stone does not release cleanly. Halving and pitting several pounds by hand is slow work; the second method, cooking whole and sieving, avoids it.
- "Barely cover with water"Just enough to keep things from catching before the juices run. Damsons are juicy and any excess simply has to be boiled off again.
- Test the set by temperature"Cook down till thick" means 220F / 105C at sea level, or the old cold-saucer test — a spoonful chilled a minute should wrinkle when pushed. The fifteen minutes given for the marmalade is a starting point, not a finish line.
- Use a wide panA broad preserving pan or heavy stockpot evaporates faster and scorches less than a deep one. Stir down to the bottom near the end, when the mixture is thick enough to stick and burn quickly.
- Skim, and expect a stray stoneDamson skins throw a good deal of pink scum; skim it off for a clearer jam. Sieved batches may still carry a chip of stone, so pass the pulp through a fine sieve rather than a wide colander.
- Sealing is not in the originalThe recipe stops at the pan. For shelf storage, follow current water-bath canning guidance for high-acid preserves; otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Damsons are a small, oval, blue-black plum generally traced to the eastern Mediterranean — the name derives from "damascene," plum of Damascus — and they reached English and later American orchards as a hardy, undemanding tree that fruited late. They are sharp and astringent raw, which is one reason the cookbooks lean on them as a preserving fruit: high acid and high pectin mean a jam that sets without help in an era before commercial pectin was on the shelf. The use of "marmalade" here for a sieved fruit pulp is the older, broader sense of the word, in use before citrus marmalade came to dominate it; a preserve could be called a marmalade if the fruit had been reduced to a smooth mass, whatever the fruit. Pound-for-pound was a common household formula, easy to remember and to scale up to whatever the tree gave you that year.