Plum Butter
In jelly-making the plums left may be put through a sieve, then placed on stove with equal quantity of sugar, cooking an hour or longer, till thick as desired. This may be spiced if liked. (See Peach Butter.)
A thrift recipe: it starts with the drained pulp left in the jelly bag, which most cooks today throw away. The whole method is contained in one sentence, so the working details are left to you.
- What "the plums left" meansThis assumes you have just made plum jelly and have a bag or sieve of cooked, drained fruit. Press that pulp through a sieve or food mill to hold back skins and stones; a blender will pulverise the skins instead of removing them and gives a duller, gritty butter.
- Equal quantity of sugarThe original does not say whether by weight or by volume, and both were used in period books. Equal weight is the safer reading for a keeping butter; if the pulp is already thin and sour from jelly-making, three-quarters the weight in sugar still sets up well and tastes less flat.
- Heat and stirringFruit butter is mostly sugar by the end and scorches easily on a modern flat-bottomed pan over direct heat. Use the widest heavy pan you have, keep the heat low to medium, and stir across the whole base every few minutes. A spatter screen saves cleaning up the volcanic plops.
- How long is "an hour or longer"An hour is a starting point, not a target. It is done when a spoonful dropped on a chilled plate holds its shape and weeps no watery ring at the edge, and when a spoon drawn across the pan floor leaves a track that closes slowly.
- Oven routeIf you would rather not stand over it, the same mixture cooks unattended in a wide roasting dish at 300F, stirred every 30 minutes, for two to three hours. It thickens by evaporation rather than by boiling, so it is harder to burn.
- SpicingThe recipe leaves the spices to the cook and refers you to Peach Butter, which is not reproduced here. Cinnamon, clove and allspice were the usual nineteenth-century choices for fruit butters. Add ground spice in the last fifteen minutes, sparingly, since long cooking makes clove in particular turn medicinal.
- Yield and keepingExpect a substantial reduction, though how much depends on how wet the sieved pulp was and how far you cook it. The recipe says nothing about sealing; treat it as a refrigerator preserve, covered and chilled, or freeze it. For shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath process for fruit butters rather than the old practice of pouring hot into jars and hoping.
Fruit butters were the second harvest of jelly day. Jelly demanded clear juice, which meant the pulp could not be squeezed or pressed, and a great deal of good fruit stayed behind in the bag; sieving it and cooking it down with sugar turned what was effectively waste into a breakfast spread. The name has nothing to do with dairy and refers to the texture, a preserve smooth and soft enough to spread with a knife, in contrast to jam with its lumps and jelly with its set. The reference to peach butter points the reader back to a method already given, since the difference between one fruit butter and another was largely only the fruit and the choice of spice.