Home › Cookery › Pickled Plums
Pickled Plums
7 pounds sweet blue plums. 4 pounds brown sugar. 2 ounces stick cinnamon. 2 ounces whole cloves. 1 quart vinegar.
Put a layer of plums and spice alternately; scald the vinegar and sugar together pour it on the plums; repeat for two or three days, the last time scalding plums and syrup together.--Mrs. W.
A classic sweet-sour spiced plum pickle of the type served alongside ham, roast pork or game. The method is a repeated hot-syrup pour, which draws liquid from the fruit gradually instead of collapsing it.
- The hinge: pour, don't boilThe plums are only heated by having boiling syrup poured over them until the very last day. This is what keeps whole plums whole; if you simmer them from the start the skins split and you get jam with cloves in it.
- Scale it downSeven pounds of plums with four pounds of sugar makes a very large batch. A quarter batch — 1 3/4 lb plums, 1 lb brown sugar, 1 cup vinegar, a scant half ounce each of cinnamon and cloves — behaves the same way and is easier to house in the refrigerator.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar was variable, often cider vinegar around 4 to 5 percent acidity. Use a commercial cider or white wine vinegar labelled 5 percent so the acidity of the finished pickle is predictable.
- Sweet blue plumsMost likely Italian prune-type plums — small, firm, freestone, deep purple. Modern dessert plums such as black or red varieties are softer and higher in water; they will slump. Choose fruit that is ripe but still firm to the thumb, and prick each one once or twice with a needle so the syrup penetrates and the skin does not burst.
- Whole spice, and baggedTwo ounces of stick cinnamon and two ounces of whole cloves is a great deal of spice for this quantity — assertive by design, since the pickle is a foil for fatty meat. Tying the spice in muslin lets you fish it out and avoids biting into a clove later. Never use ground spice here; it clouds the syrup.
- The three-day rhythmDay one and day two, drain the syrup off the fruit, bring it back to a boil, and pour it over again. On the third day bring plums and syrup to a boil together for a minute or two, no longer. Between pourings keep the crock covered and cool.
- VesselUse glass, stainless steel or glazed stoneware. Vinegar at this concentration will strip an aluminium or bare cast-iron pan and take on a metallic taste.
- StorageThe original assumes a cool cellar and a crock under a cloth. Today, either refrigerate the finished pickle and eat it within a couple of months, or pack it hot into sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath following a current tested procedure for pickled fruit. The recipe as written gives no sealing instruction at all.
- RestingThe flavour is raw and sharp on the third day. Give it three to four weeks before opening a jar; the clove settles and the syrup turns rounder.
Sweet pickled fruit — plums, peaches, damsons, cherries, watermelon rind — was a fixture of the Virginia table and appears throughout Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), Marion Cabell Tyree's compilation of contributions from Southern housekeepers, credited variously by initial, as here with "Mrs. W.," by full name, or by place. The technique is inherited directly from English practice: sugar, vinegar and whole warm spice as a preserving medium goes back to the medieval and early modern European kitchen, where it produced condiments meant to cut through salt pork, boiled ham and roast game. In a household running on a summer glut and a winter of cured meat, a crock of spiced plums was less a delicacy than an economy — fruit that would otherwise rot, converted into something that kept until spring and made the ham interesting. The repeated scalding-and-pouring method described here was one common way to preserve whole fruit before reliable jar seals, and it survived in American cookbooks long after home canning arrived.