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Garfield Butter
Take two-thirds plums and one-third peaches. Pare, pit and slice the peaches, and if plums are freestones, remove pits. Cook peaches and plums together till soft, rub through colander or coarse sieve. If plums happen to be clingstones, the pits are removed in the sieving process. To each measure of pulp add three-fourths of a measure of sugar, cook slowly, stir often, till right consistency. Pack hot in hot sterilized jars. Seal.
A late-summer plum and peach butter, thickened by long slow cooking rather than added pectin. The whole thing hinges on reducing it without scorching.
- "Measure" means volume, not weightMeasure the sieved pulp in cups and add three-quarters as many cups of sugar: 4 cups pulp to 3 cups sugar. The ratio is deliberately low for a preserve, which is why the finished butter is spreadable rather than jelled.
- Freestone and clingstoneFreestone plums release their pits cleanly when halved; the recipe says that if the plums cling to their stones, the sieving step catches the pits instead. Either kind of plum works. The peaches are pared, pitted and sliced whichever sort they are.
- Peel the peaches the easy wayThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will slip the skins. Plum skins stay on for the cooking, which is where much of the colour comes from; the sieve then holds most of them back.
- Use a wide, heavy panFruit butter thickens by evaporation and burns readily once it starts to mound. A wide stainless or enamelled pan with plenty of surface area shortens the cooking, and the stirring needs to be near-constant towards the end.
- "Right consistency"The butter is done when a spoonful dropped on a chilled plate holds its shape and no ring of liquid seeps out, and when a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly. A thermometer is not much help with a butter this lightly sugared. Reckon on a long slow cook, the exact time depending on how juicy the fruit was.
- SealingPacking boiling-hot into hot jars and sealing, with no further processing, was standard practice when this was written and is no longer considered adequate on its own. Follow current tested guidance for processing fruit butters, or treat the batch as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
Fruit butters are the thrifty end of American preserving: fruit too soft or too plentiful for canning in halves gets sieved, sweetened lightly and cooked down until it will spread. Plums and peaches ripen together in late summer, and the plums supply acid and colour that peaches alone lack. Nothing here explains the name Garfield, and no connection to a particular kitchen or origin is recorded.