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Preserved Plums
4 pounds sugar damsons or green gages or blue plums Pick over and prick plums. Arrange alternate layers of plums and sugar in bowl, let stand over night; in the morning drain off syrup, boil, and skim; add plums and cook until tender. Cool plums on platter, fill jars with plums, then with boiling syrup, and seal. 4 pounds quinces
A cold-sugar maceration preserve of the old school: the fruit gives up its own juice overnight, so no water is added at any point. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start.
- The missing weight of fruitThe line reads "4 pounds sugar damsons or green gages or blue plums" because the ingredient list has run together and the fruit weight has dropped out. Pound-for-pound sugar to fruit was a common proportion for preserves of this kind, so 4 lb plums to 4 lb sugar is the likely reading, and that much sugar is what makes the syrup thick enough to keep.
- "4 pounds quinces"The trailing line appears to be the opening ingredient of the recipe that follows rather than part of this one. Ignore it.
- The fruitDamsons are small, oval, very tart blue plums, still sold at farmers' markets in late summer; greengages are the small green dessert plum. Any firm, tart, freestone or clingstone plum works. Supermarket dessert plums are sweeter and softer and will collapse sooner, so cut the cooking short with them.
- Prick the plumsThis is the hinge. A few pricks through the skin with a needle or fork let the sugar draw juice out and later let syrup in; unpricked plums burst raggedly and shed their skins in the pan.
- Overnight standingLayer fruit and sugar in a non-reactive bowl, cover, and leave 8-12 hours at cool room temperature or in the refrigerator. You should have several cups of ruby syrup in the morning with the sugar largely dissolved.
- "Cook until tender"Expect 5-10 minutes at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and stop while the plums still hold their shape. Old preserving recipes assume the cook is watching; anything past tender gives you jam, not preserved whole plums.
- Cooling on a platterLifting the fruit out to cool separates fruit from syrup, so the jars can be packed with whole plums and then topped up; the recipe asks only that the syrup be boiling when it goes in, not that it be reduced.
- Sealing"Seal" in a book of this date generally meant filling the jars and closing them with no further processing. Current practice is a boiling-water bath; follow up-to-date guidance for whole fruit packed in syrup rather than the shorter jam times, and allow longer at altitude. Without processing the jars are refrigerator preserves, good a few weeks.
- YieldFour pounds of plums with four pounds of sugar fills several pint jars; the exact number depends on how much of the syrup you pack in.
Lowney's Cook Book, published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and written by Maria Willett Howard, belongs to the era when a preserving chapter was a household necessity rather than a hobby, and when equal weights of fruit and sugar was a common formula for preserves of this kind. The cold-sugar method here, letting the fruit stand in sugar overnight before any heat touches it, is older than the book and was prized because it keeps the plums whole; boiling raw fruit in syrup tends to shred the skins. Damsons and greengages, both named in the recipe, were more common in American markets then than now. The damson takes its name from Damascus, the fruit being generally traced back to Syria, while the greengage is said to have reached England in the early eighteenth century through the Gage family, whose name it kept.