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Plums Dried with Sugar
Cut open plums of some sweet variety, but do not remove stones. Place on plates and sprinkle sugar over fruit, setting in a slow oven. The sugar will be absorbed by the plums, when add more sugar and repeat as long as there is juice sufficient to take it up. Pack in layers in jars. TO DRY PLUMS WHOLE ("American Prunes") Take ripe purple plums and spread on earthen dishes. Dry in the sun, putting them out each day to dry eight or ten hours, or use a cool oven, turning the fruit over frequently.
Two preserving methods sit side by side here: a candied, syrup-soaked plum that ends up somewhere near a glacé fruit, and plain sun- or oven-dried prunes. Both are workable today, but the oven temperatures the book implies are far higher than anything you want for drying.
- "Slow oven" is too hot for thisPeriod figures vary between sources, but a slow oven is generally reckoned at roughly 275-300F and a cool oven lower still, perhaps 200-250F. Either will tend to cook the fruit rather than dry it. Set an oven to its lowest setting, ideally 140-170F, and prop the door open with a wooden spoon so moisture escapes; a dehydrator on the fruit setting does the same work unattended.
- The hinge: keep taking up the juiceThe sugared version only works if you add sugar in stages, each time the previous addition has dissolved into the liquid the plums release. Dump it all in at once and you get a plate of syrup with fruit floating in it rather than a plum that has slowly candied itself dry.
- Stones stay inLeaving the stone raises no safety issue for plums, and the fruit holds its shape better. It does mean warning anyone eating them. If you want them stoned, cut around the pit and dry cut side up so the cavity does not pool syrup.
- Earthen dishesEarthenware is inert and holds sun heat, though the recipe does not specify whether the dishes were glazed. Any glass or ceramic dish works; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which react with fruit acid and darken the plums.
- "American prunes"Simply purple plums dried whole, as against imported French prunes made from the Agen variety. Italian-type prune plums, which are dense and freestone, dry far better than round dessert plums like Santa Rosa, which are too watery.
- Sun-drying in practiceCover the fruit with cheesecloth or fine netting raised off the surface, bring the plates indoors at night so dew does not rewet them, and expect three to five hot dry days rather than one. Skins may need checking — a brief dip in boiling water cracks the wax so moisture can leave.
- Knowing when it is doneDried plums should be leathery and pliable with no bead of moisture when torn or squeezed. Cool completely, then condition them in a loosely closed jar for a week, shaking daily; if condensation appears, they need more drying time.
- StoragePack in clean airtight jars away from light. Sun-dried fruit can carry insect eggs, so many modern guides recommend freezing the finished fruit for two days before storing. Check jars for mould over the first fortnight.
- YieldReckon on roughly a quarter of the starting weight for plain dried plums — 4 lb of fresh fruit gives about 1 lb dried. The sugared version loses less weight because it takes on sugar as it loses water.
Drying was the oldest and cheapest way to keep a plum glut, and the two recipes here mark the two directions a nineteenth-century household could take it: sugar-heavy confectionery for the store cupboard, or plain fruit for winter stewing. The label "American Prunes" is telling — commercial prunes were long a French and later a Californian trade, built on the Agen plum brought to the Santa Clara and Sacramento valleys in the mid-1800s, and books like this one were encouraging households to produce a domestic equivalent from whatever purple plums the garden gave them. The staged sugaring in the first method is the same principle behind candied peel and glacé cherries: sugar entering the fruit as water leaves it, slowly enough that the flesh does not collapse. Fruit-preserving manuals of this kind are often said to have proliferated because home canning was still relatively new and not fully trusted, and sun-drying, whatever the reason for its popularity, needed no jars, no rubber rings and no fuel.