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Plum Conserve
5 lb. blue plums 5 lb. gran. sugar 4 oranges, rind and pulp 1 lb. seeded raisins 1 lb. English walnuts Boil until thick. Pour in jelly glasses.
Mrs. Geo. Smith.
A conserve in the old sense: fruit cooked with sugar plus citrus, raisins and nuts. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how preserves behave, so the gaps are worth filling.
- The hinge: when to add the walnutsNuts stirred in at the start turn soft and can make the syrup cloudy and slightly rancid-tasting after storage. Chop them and fold them in during the last five minutes of boiling, once the conserve has already thickened.
- Pit the plums, keep the skinsBlue plums here means damson-type or Italian prune plums; the Italian prunes halve and pit easily, damsons cling to the stone and are more work. The skins contribute colour and a good share of the pectin, so leave them on.
- What to do with the orangesRind and pulp means the whole fruit less the seeds and the coarse white pith. Slice the peel very thin or run it through a grinder, discard the pips, and add both peel and flesh at the start so the rind has the full cooking time to soften.
- "Boil until thick"On a candy thermometer this is roughly 220F at sea level, or the point where a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed. Expect 40 minutes to an hour in a wide, heavy pan; a narrow deep pot will take considerably longer and is more likely to scorch.
- Stirring and scorchingWith 5 lb of sugar and raisins in the pot the mixture catches easily once it thickens. Stir across the bottom with a flat-edged spoon, and drop the heat as it nears the setting point.
- Jelly glasses and sealingA jelly glass held roughly six to eight ounces, and was commonly sealed with a disc of melted paraffin. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended, as it shrinks and lets mould in; use half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids and process them in a boiling water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldNo yield is given; from these quantities expect a large batch, on the order of a dozen or more half-pint jars depending on how far the conserve is reduced.
- ServingConserve of this type was commonly served with meat rather than simply spread on toast: roast pork, ham, cold turkey or game.
A conserve, in nineteenth and early twentieth century American usage, was generally distinguished from jam by what went into it besides fruit and sugar: raisins, citrus, and nuts, often walnuts. The combination of plums, oranges and English walnuts was a common version and recurs with small variations in community cookbooks of the period. Church and society cookbooks were compiled from members' own kitchens and sold to raise money, so recipes travelled by copying and contributors were credited by name. The brevity here is typical of the genre: the proportions are recorded and the method is left to the reader.