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Brandied Plums
Prepare in the same manner as Brandied Peaches, but prick plums with knitting needle several times before cooking.
A cross-reference recipe: the whole of it depends on the book's Brandied Peaches, which follows the standard preserving pattern of a heavy sugar syrup, a brief poach, and brandy stirred in off the heat. The single instruction unique to plums — pricking — is the one that matters.
- Prick before, not afterPlum skins are tough and nearly waterproof, so unpricked fruit tends to burst as the flesh swells. The recipe asks only for "several" punctures with a knitting needle; a thin metal skewer or trussing needle does the same job, letting steam escape and syrup in.
- Do not peelNothing here calls for skinning the plums, and the pricking step only makes sense on fruit left whole in its skin. The skins also carry most of the colour, and dark varieties will tint the syrup.
- Which plumsFirm, slightly underripe types hold up best — Italian prune plums, damsons, greengages. Soft dessert plums collapse into jam in the syrup.
- Add the brandy off the heatAlcohol boils off well below water, so brandy simmered in the syrup loses strength. The safer reading is to add it to the jars or to the syrup after it comes off the fire, though this page does not say.
- Poach brieflyOnce the syrup returns to a simmer the plums need only a few minutes, until a needle slides in with no resistance at the centre. Cooked to genuine softness, plum skins split and the stones work loose.
- Brandy strengthThe preserving effect assumes a full-strength spirit, roughly 40 percent alcohol. Modern flavoured brandies and lower-proof fruit liqueurs are both sweeter and weaker, and will not do the same work in the jar.
- StorageSugar and spirit together make this a durable preserve, but the recipe gives no processing time or temperature at all. Treat the finished jars as refrigerator preserves, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for the sealing step.
- Yield and servingServing -- Brandied fruit was generally served in small dishes as a sweet, or alongside roast meats and cold game; the syrup is strong enough to be spooned sparingly. The recipe itself gives no quantities or yield.
Brandying was one of several preserving routes available in an American household book of this period, alongside drying, sugar preserving and vinegar pickling — the sugar and the spirit each suppress spoilage, and together they let stone fruit keep from late summer into winter. Lowney's, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate, is remembered chiefly for confectionery, but it also carried a general household program with a preserving chapter. The telescoped instruction here — prepare as for peaches, but prick — is characteristic of how these chapters were compiled: one worked method for a fruit type, then a run of one-line variations, on the assumption that a cook reads the section rather than a single page. The knitting needle in place of a purpose-made tool is a small reminder that the preserving kitchen borrowed equipment from elsewhere in the house.