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Wild Plum Marmalade
1 Cover well with water and cook wild red plums until soft; let stand till cool, then drain and put through a coarse sieve. Use pound for pound of fruit and sugar, cooking down till thick. The water in which the plums were simmered may be added to the fruit and sugar or not, as preferred, as it may be set aside for other uses.
A straightforward two-ingredient preserve, but the original leaves out pan size, doneness tests and keeping instructions. The hinge is the sieve: the pits and skins must be separated from the pulp before sugar ever touches it, or you cannot get them out afterwards.
- Which plumsWild red plums means Prunus americana and its relatives — small, thin-skinned, very tart and high in pectin. Damsons or underripe Italian prunes behave similarly; fully ripe supermarket plums are lower in acid and pectin and will need longer cooking to set.
- Cooking until softBarely cover with water rather than "cover well" — 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering is enough for the fruit to collapse. Too much water only has to be boiled off again later.
- The coarse sieveA food mill or a stiff sieve worked with a wooden spoon separates pulp from pits and skins. Cooling first, as directed, genuinely helps: hot fruit slips through and takes bits of skin with it.
- Pound for poundWeigh the sieved pulp, not the whole fruit you started with, since pits and skins account for a noticeable share of the starting weight. Equal weights of pulp and sugar is roughly 2 1/4 cups sugar to each pound of pulp.
- Cooking down till thickExpect 20 to 40 minutes at a hard boil in a wide, heavy pan, stirring often once it thickens, since a pure fruit pulp scorches readily. It is done at about 220F, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed.
- The cooking waterWild plum liquid is tart and lightly set; it makes a good base for jelly or a drink. Adding it back to the pulp only extends the boiling time.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of whole plums gives roughly a pint and a half of marmalade. The original gives no sealing or storing directions; treat it as a modern high-sugar preserve and follow current water-bath canning directions, or refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Wild plums are too sour and too stony to eat out of hand, but well supplied with acid and pectin, which is exactly what a preserve wants. The word marmalade, from the Portuguese marmelada for quince paste, had by the nineteenth century loosened in American usage to mean any thick preserve of sieved fruit pulp, with no citrus and no shredded peel implied. What distinguishes this recipe from a jam is precisely the sieve: pitting wild plums by hand is impractical at any volume, so the fruit is cooked whole and pushed through, and the recipe leaves saving the cooking water as an option.