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Damson Pickle
7 pounds fruit. 1 ounce cinnamon. 1 ounce cloves. 1 ounce mace. 1 ounce celery-seed. 3 pounds brown sugar.
Spices to be beaten fine; put them in the jar, sprinkling the spice through in layers boil one quart vinegar with the sugar, and pour over the fruit and spices. Repeat the scalding of the vinegar for four days.--Mrs. C. N.
A sweet spiced pickle of the kind Virginia households kept on hand to serve alongside cold ham and roast meats. The method is the old "repeated scalding" technique, and it is the whole point of the recipe.
- The four-day scalding is the hingeEach day you pour the syrup off the fruit, bring it back to a boil, and pour it back over hot. This gradually draws water out of the plums and concentrates the syrup without ever cooking the fruit to a pulp, which is what would happen if you simmered damsons in vinegar for the equivalent length of time in one go.
- Prick the fruitDamson skins are tough and will split unevenly under hot syrup. Piercing each plum two or three times with a needle lets the syrup enter and keeps the fruit whole rather than collapsed and floating in a shrivelled skin.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied a good deal in acidity. Use a standard 5 percent vinegar; cider vinegar suits the fruit best, though the recipe does not specify a type.
- The spices are whole, not ground"Beaten fine" means pounded in a mortar from whole cinnamon bark, cloves, blade mace and celery seed. An ounce each comes to 4 ounces of spice in total for 7 pounds of fruit, which is assertive by modern standards but in line with other spiced fruit pickles of the period. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed; ground nutmeg is not the same thing, though it is the nearest substitute.
- Celery seedIt reads oddly in a fruit pickle to a modern eye, but celery seed turns up in a number of nineteenth-century sweet pickle recipes and gives the savoury edge that lets the dish sit beside meat rather than beside dessert.
- If you cannot find damsonsDamsons are small, oval, intensely tart blue plums with a short late-summer season. Italian prune plums are the usual stand-in; they are sweeter, so the pickle will be less sharp and you may want to cut the sugar somewhat.
- StorageThe original assumes a stone jar in a cool larder and nothing more. Current practice for a pickle intended to keep at room temperature is to pack it into sterilised jars and process it in a boiling-water bath; otherwise keep it refrigerated and treat it as a few weeks' condiment rather than a year's supply.
- YieldAround 6 to 8 pints. It improves after a month or two in the jar, as the spice settles into the fruit.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathers contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries close with something like "Mrs. C. N." The damson takes its name from the damascene, or plum of Damascus. The tree was a common feature of American kitchen gardens and hedgerows, being hardy and generally self-fertile, and its sharpness made it fruit that was usually preserved rather than eaten raw. Sweet pickled fruit of this kind was commonly served with cold ham, tongue and roast meats on a Southern sideboard, filling something of the role that chutney and cranberry sauce fill now.