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Plums Spiced
When making marmalade with plums that do not require soda (for bitterness or extreme acidity) save the water poured off after simmering to tenderness and cook down one-fourth or till rather thick. To a quart of this juice add a pint each of sugar and vinegar, a teaspoon of allspice and one-half teaspoon each of mace, cloves, and cinnamon. Pour, after boiling thirty minutes, over fresh, ripe plums which have (each) been pricked in several places. Place in heated jars; cover and let stand twelve hours; drain; re-cook syrup and pour over plums. Repeat, letting syrup thicken to one-half the last cooking. Seal while hot. A syrup of the sugar and vinegar may be used without adding fruit juice.
This is a sweet-sour spiced plum pickle built on a by-product: the liquid drained off plums that were simmered soft for marmalade. The method is graduated syruping, and the order of operations matters more than the exact spice weights.
- The hinge: prick every plumWhole plums with intact skins will burst and shed their flesh into the syrup. Several deep pricks with a needle or fork tine let the hot syrup in and the steam out, so the fruit stays whole and plumps rather than collapsing.
- Why the syrup is drained and re-cookedEach 12-hour stand pulls water out of the fruit and thins the syrup; re-boiling reconcentrates it and drives more sugar in. Doing it in stages instead of boiling the plums hard in thick syrup is what keeps them from shrivelling into leather.
- UnitsA quart is 4 cups, a pint 2 cups. So the full version is 4 cups reduced plum liquid, 2 cups sugar, 2 cups vinegar. "Cook down one-fourth" is ambiguous: it most likely means boiling away a quarter of the volume, but the recipe's own "or till rather thick" suggests the cook was meant to judge by consistency rather than by measure.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar of the period varied a good deal; modern bottled vinegar is usually around 5 percent acidity. Use cider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent and do not substitute anything weaker, since the vinegar is diluted by twice its own volume of fruit juice.
- The soda remarkSoda was sometimes used to blunt acidity or bitterness, and is best ignored: it neutralises the acid a pectin set depends on, dulls the colour, and can leave a soapy edge. This recipe is in any case written for plums that need no such treatment.
- SpicesThe recipe does not say whether the spices are ground or whole. Ground allspice, mace, cloves and cinnamon will leave the syrup cloudy and gritty; bruised whole spice tied in a scrap of muslin gives a clear syrup you can lift the spice out of when the flavour is where you want it, bearing in mind that whole and ground spice are not interchangeable measure for measure.
- Sealing"Seal while hot" is open-kettle canning, which is no longer accepted practice for shelf storage even with acid fruit. Treat the finished jars as refrigerator preserves, or follow a current tested spiced-plum recipe for boiling-water-bath times if you want them on the shelf.
- Yield and servingServing -- The recipe gives no quantity of fruit, only of syrup, so yield depends entirely on how many plums you pack. These are a condiment, not a dessert preserve: they belong beside cold ham, roast pork, duck or a sharp cheese.
Spiced or "pickled" plums belong to a long line of sweet-sour fruit relishes that carried English and American cooking through the winter, close cousins of spiced currants and pickled peaches. Damsons and other small firm plums take to the treatment well, since their thick skins survive repeated syruping, and allspice, clove, cinnamon and mace are among the spices long used for such pickles. The thrift at the head of this version is worth noting: the water poured off plums simmered for marmalade is treated as an ingredient in its own right rather than tipped down the drain. Household economy of that sort recurs throughout American fruit-preserving manuals, written for kitchens where a glut of orchard fruit arrived all at once and had to be put by in every form possible.