Home › The Plum › Plum Leather
Plum Leather
Remove the pits of thoroughly ripe greengages and mash the fruit, then proceed as with peach leather. Add sugar to the plums.
This is a two-line entry that leans entirely on the peach leather recipe elsewhere in the book: fruit is puréed, sweetened, spread thin and dried until it can be rolled. Everything the original leaves out is the part worth knowing.
- What "proceed as with peach leather" meansThe peach leather entry elsewhere in the book is the instruction being pointed to: the sweetened pulp (cooked down first in some versions, spread raw in others) goes onto a lightly oiled surface in a thin, even sheet and is dried slowly until leathery and no longer tacky. Nineteenth-century books commonly dried it in the sun under cheesecloth; a low oven or dehydrator does the same job.
- Greengages, and what to use insteadGreengages are small green-gold European plums, honey-sweet and low in acid, sold briefly in late summer at farm markets. Italian prune plums or damsons both work; damsons are much tarter and will want more sugar.
- The sugar is unmeasured"Add sugar to the plums" is all the original says, and the right amount depends on the fruit. Sweeten the hot purée to taste, keeping in mind that drying concentrates the flavour considerably, so stop short of what tastes right in the pan.
- Skins and pitsOnly pits are removed here. Plum skins carry much of the colour and some of the pectin, and break down during cooking, so leave them in and puree or sieve after cooking rather than peeling.
- Drying temperatureA dehydrator at 135F, or an oven at its lowest setting (usually 140-170F) with the door propped for airflow. Higher heat sets a crust on top while the middle stays wet, which is how fruit leather spoils.
- Thickness and timingSpread about 1/8 inch thick. Expect 6 to 10 hours; it is done when the centre is no longer sticky and the sheet peels away cleanly in one piece.
- Yield and storageTwo pounds of plums gives roughly one large baking-sheet's worth. Cut into strips, roll in parchment, and keep airtight; it will hold a few weeks at room temperature and considerably longer refrigerated, but any remaining softness in the centre invites mould.
Fruit leather is one of the oldest ways of keeping a glut, predating jarred preserves by a long way — the technique appears across the Caucasus, Turkey and Persia, where sheets of dried plum, apricot and grape pulp are still made, and it arrived in American cookery early enough that "peach leather" was a familiar Southern sweetmeat well before this book was printed. The greengage specified here is the plum the French call Reine Claude; the English name is generally traced to the Gage family, the traditional account most often naming Sir William Gage of Hengrave Hall, around 1724, though other versions credit his relative Sir Thomas, and the tale that the tree's original label was lost in transit is tradition rather than documented fact. Its high sugar and gentle acidity make it a natural choice for leather, since a sweet, low-acid pulp needs little added sugar. That this recipe consists of a single cross-reference tells you how routine the process was in a household kitchen: the writer assumed anyone reaching for the plum chapter had already read the peach one.