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Plums (Sloe or wild Plum borne by our)
THE Sloe, or wild Plum, borne by our Blackthorn of the hedgerows, is well known as an oval, blue-black, small fruit, of autumn produce, harsh, and sour until mellowed by the early frosts. Its dark ruby juice enters largely into the manufacture of British Port wine. If obtained by expression of the Sloes this juice is very useful as an astringent medicine, and is a popular remedy for stopping nose-bleeding. Country people bury the Sloes in jars to preserve them for winter use; they should be gathered on a dry day, picked clean, and put into jars, or bottles, without any boiling, or other such process, and then covered with loaf sugar; a tablespoonful of brandy should be presently added, and the jar sealed. By Christmas the syrup formed by the juice, the sugar, and the spirit, will have covered, and saturated the fruit; so that then a couple of tablespoonfuls will not only serve as an agreeable dessert liqueur, but will further act as an astringent cordial of a very useful sort. The Sloe bush is often called provincially "Scroggs." Sloe leaves, when they unfold late in the spring, will, if dried, make a very good substitute for foreign tea. The blossoms answer for preparing a safe, harmless, laxative syrup excellent for children; by taking a spoonful or two daily for three, or four days, costiveness will be overcome gently, and painlessly, but thoroughly.
The hard, round Bullace (Prunus insititia) grows likewise in our English hedgerows, this being the fruit (five times as big as the Sloe) of a shrub having fewer thorns. Country folk make therefrom Bullace wine; and boys in France call both fruits (equally astringent) "Sibarelles," because it is so difficult to whistle immediately after masticating them. Wild Plums in Devonshire are Kestings, or Gristlings.
The cultivated Plum has been developed from the Sloe, and wild Plum; its Damson variety being formerly the fruit product of Damascus, (Damascenes). When ripe the cultivated Plums are cooling, and slightly laxative, especially the French fruit, which is dried, and bottled for dessert. Philip Dormer, the famous Lord Chesterfield, in one of the well-known letters to his son then at Paris (1757), told him: "Lord Bacon, who was a very great physician in both senses of the word, hath this aphorism in his essay on 'Health': 'Nihil magis ad sanitatem tribuit quam crebræ et domesticæ purgationes'; by domesticæ S
The passage is mostly natural history, but at its centre is a working method: raw sloes layered with sugar and a spoonful of brandy, sealed, and left until Christmas. That method is the problem.
- Why the preservation failsRaw fruit, an unmeasured quantity of sugar and a single tablespoon of brandy do not add up to a reliable preserving medium. One spoonful of brandy is far too little to act as a preservative at any plausible jar size, the sugar concentration is uncontrolled, and nothing is heated. What forms over three months may be an uninoculated ferment as much as a cordial, and surface moulds on stored fruit can grow well before the sugar syrup covers everything.
- A sealed jar of fermenting fruitWild yeasts on the sloe skins have sugar, moisture and time. In a jar sealed tight in October and opened at Christmas, that pressure has nowhere to go. If you want a sloe liqueur, use a current recipe with a stated spirit strength and a vented or properly managed closure.
- The medicinal claimsSloe juice as a styptic for nosebleeds, and blackthorn blossom syrup given to children as a laxative for several days running, belong to the book's period and not to any current practice. Neither should be acted on.
- Loaf sugarThe hard refined cone or block sugar of the period, broken or nipped into lumps. Modern granulated is its descendant, but note that the original gives no weight at all — only "covered with loaf sugar," which is not a measurement.
- Sloes and bullacesPrunus spinosa, the blackthorn of British hedgerows, and Prunus insititia, the bullace. Both are edible but ferociously astringent raw; the frost the text mentions softens the flesh rather than sweetening it much. Neither is sold commercially in most places, so foraging accuracy matters.
- Sloe-leaf teaThe dried young leaves were genuinely used as a tea adulterant and substitute in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when duty made real tea expensive. It is a curiosity rather than a recommendation.
Blackthorn ran through English rural economy at every level: the wood for walking sticks and shillelaghs, the thorns for pegs, the blossom as the first white in the March hedge, and the fruit for wine, cordial and — as this entry says — for the manufacture of "British Port," a domestic imitation trade that flourished in the nineteenth century. The dialect names collected here, "Scroggs" in the provinces, "Kestings" or "Gristlings" in Devonshire, are the sort of thing Victorian and Edwardian compilers gathered enthusiastically, and the French schoolboys' "sibarelles" is a nice joke about a mouth too puckered to whistle. The claim that the cultivated plum was developed from the sloe is the received wisdom of the period; modern work on Prunus domestica treats the domestic plum as a hybrid, with the sloe as well as Prunus cerasifera among the putative parents, so the older claim is not simply superseded. The derivation of "damson" from Damascus is generally accepted. The whole entry sits in a book that treats the larder as a dispensary, and the Chesterfield quotation about domestic purgations shows exactly the frame of mind in which an autumn hedgerow fruit was valued as much for what it did to the bowels as for how it tasted.