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Pickled Plums
I quart (4 cups) vinegar 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 oz. white ginger 1 oz. allspice 1 oz. cloves 1 oz. whole peppers I shallot 6 chillies Choose young green plums and wipe them well; now put a layer of salt into an earthenware dish, then a layer of the plums, and repeat these layers until the dish is full, being careful to end with the salt. Leave this for four days, then lift out the fruit, drain well, and dry it in the sun, turning it constantly for three days.
Put the vinegar and the spices into a saucepan; bring them to boiling point and simmer for ten minutes; then strain and leave till cold. Pour on the fruit and bottle it.
A sharp, savoury vinegar pickle rather than the sweet spiced plums of American preserving books — one tablespoon of sugar to a quart of vinegar is essentially a seasoning, not a syrup. The salting and drying stages matter more than the boiling.
- The hinge: the plums must be hard and greenThese are immature fruit, picked while the flesh is still firm and the stone soft. Ripe plums collapse under four days of dry salt and will turn to mush in the vinegar.
- Ounces of whole spice are a lotAn ounce of whole cloves is close to a third of a cup; an ounce of allspice or peppercorns is roughly three to four tablespoons. All of it is strained out, so the vinegar is being infused rather than the pickle spiced directly. Use whole spices, not ground, or the strained liquid will be muddy.
- White gingerDried, peeled whole ginger root, sold in hard pale knobs. Bruise it before it goes into the pan. Dried root from a spice shop is the closest thing; fresh ginger gives a brighter, less resinous flavour.
- ChilliesWhole small dried red chillies. The recipe does not say which kind; six in a quart of vinegar will give warmth rather than fierce heat unless the variety is a hot one.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — malt or cider both suit this. The acid is doing the preserving, so it should not be diluted or replaced with anything weaker, such as a wine vinegar of uncertain strength.
- The sun-drying stageThree days of turning fruit outdoors assumes a hot, dry climate and clean air. Indoors, drain the salted plums well and leave them on racks in a warm airy place, or in an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, until the surfaces are dry and leathery. The point is to remove surface moisture so the vinegar is not watered down.
- StorageNothing here is heat-processed, so treat the finished jars as refrigerator pickles rather than shelf-stable preserves. Cover the fruit completely with the cold spiced vinegar, seal with a non-corroding lid, and keep cold. Discard any jar that shows cloudiness, gas or surface mould.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantity of fruit; a quart of vinegar will cover roughly 2 lb of plums. Leave them some weeks before eating; the flavour is raw and hot until the spice settles.
- ServingThis is a condiment for cold meat, curry, cheese or a raised pie — served in small quantities, a plum or two per person.
Pickles of hard green fruit were a standing feature of British household books through the nineteenth century, and the dry salting, the days of sun-drying, the chillies and the whole dried ginger echo the technique of Indian achar, though the line of transmission is not something the recipe itself evidences; such pickles sat alongside the older native tradition of pickling walnuts, samphire and unripe fruit in spiced vinegar. Green plums here would have been thinnings from the tree, or fruit taken before the stone hardened. Recipes of the period sometimes call such things "mock mangoes," though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Their presence in a book about casserole cookery reflects how these volumes were assembled: a core of dishes for the earthenware pot, padded out with the preserves, pickles and sauces any household was expected to lay down for itself.