Damsons, Preserved
INGREDIENTS.-To every quart of damsons allow 1/2 lb. of loaf sugar. AVERAGE COST, 6d. per quart.
Put the damsons (which should be picked from the stalks and quite free from blemishes) into a jar, with pounded sugar sprinkled amongst them in the above pro- DAMSONS, TO PRESERVE. portion; tie the jar closely down, set it in a saucepan of cold water; bring it gradually to boil, and simmer gently until the damsons are soft, without being broken.
Let them stand till cold; then strain the juice from them, boil it up well, strain it through a jelly-bag, and pour it over the fruit. Let it cool, cover with oiled papers, and the jars with tissue-paper, brushed over on both sides with the white of an egg, and store away in a dry place.
Time.-About 3/4 hour to simmer the fruit after the water boils; hour to boil the juice.
SEASONABLE.-Make this in September or October.
Damsons, or any kind of Plums, To Preserve. (Usefrl in Winter.) -INGREDIENTS.-Damsons o plums; boiling water. AVERAGE COST, Jd. per quart. Pick the fruit into clean, dry stone jars. taking care to leave out all that are broken or blemished. When full, pour boiling water on the plums, until it stands one inch above the fruit; cut a piece of paper to fit the inside of the jar, over which pour melted mutton-suet; cover down with brown paper, and keep the jars in a dry, cool place. When used, the suet should be removed, the water poured off, and the jelly at the bottom of the jar used and mixed with the fruit.
SEASONABLE in September and October.
Darioles à la Vanille. (Sweet Entremets) - INGREDIENTS for 6 or 7 darioles. pint of milk, pint of cream, 2 oz. of flour, 3 oz. of pounded sugar, 6 eggs, 2 oz. of butter, puff-paste, flavouring of essence of vanilla. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 8d.
Mix the flour to a smooth batter, with the milk; stir in the cream, sugar, the eggs, which should be well DARIOLE MOULD. whisked, and the butter, which should be beaten to a cream.
Put in some essence of vanilla, drop by drop, until the mixture well flavoured; line dariole-moulds some with puff-paste, threeparts fill them with the batter, and bake in a good oven from 25 to 35 minutes.
Turn them out of the moulds on a dish, without breaking them; strew over sifted sugar, and serve. The flavouring of the darioles may be varied by substituting lemon, cinnamon, or almonds for the vanilla, DARK SAUCE.
TIME.-25 to 35 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Three separate items have run together on this page: two methods for keeping damsons through winter and a baked custard entremets. The two preserving methods are the problem — both rely on a seal that modern food science does not accept, and neither gives a processing temperature or time that can be verified.
- Why the first method failsHalf a pound of sugar to a quart of fruit is below the sugar concentration that makes a preserve reliably shelf-stable, and the finished jars are closed only with oiled and egg-glazed paper. That is a dust cover, not a hermetic seal; mould and yeast can colonise the surface of a low-sugar, unsealed fruit preserve stored at room temperature. Use a current tested recipe for damson jam or bottled plums instead.
- Why the suet method failsThe second recipe pours boiling water over raw fruit in a stone jar and floats melted mutton suet on top as the seal. Nothing is processed to a measured temperature, and the fat cap can crack and lift as it cools and as the jar is moved, leaving the fruit and water beneath open to spoilage organisms. Fat-sealed containers are the configuration modern canning guidance rules out.
- "Simmer gently until soft" is not a processThe jar sits in cold water that is brought gradually to the boil, so the fruit itself may never reach boiling point, and the recipe gives no target temperature at all. There is no way to reproduce it as a controlled heat treatment, which is why it cannot be corrected by simply lengthening the time.
- The times as printed are brokenBoth time notes read "About hour" and "hour" — the fractions have dropped out in the original typesetting, as they have in several ingredient lines. Do not guess at them; the numbers are genuinely missing.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a cone and broken up, then pounded in a mortar. It is ordinary white sugar; "pounded" simply means crushed fine enough to dissolve.
- Darioles: the moulds and the ovenDariole moulds are small tin cups, roughly 3 fl oz; ramekins or a deep muffin tin stand in. The book gives no temperature, only "a good oven" — read as moderately hot, in the region of 350-400F.
- Darioles: the batterMix the flour to a smooth paste with a little of the milk before adding the rest, or it will lump. The milk and cream quantities have lost their fractions in this printing, but six eggs to the stated dairy gives a very rich custard that will rise and then settle — turn them out while just warm, before they shrink from the pastry.
- Almond flavouringWhere the recipe offers almonds as a substitute for vanilla, Victorian kitchens often meant bitter almond essence. Use modern almond extract; bitter almonds themselves are not a domestic ingredient.
Damsons are a small, tart, blue-black plum long grown in English hedgerows and orchards; the name descends from damascenum, the plum of Damascus, and the fruit is generally traced to the eastern Mediterranean before its long naturalisation in Britain. Too astringent to be much enjoyed raw, damsons earned their place in books like this one entirely through preserving — jam, cheese, jelly, bottled fruit and gin. The September-to-October season, the stone jars, the mutton-suet seal and the egg-glazed tissue covers all belong to a household without refrigeration or reliable glass jars with rubber rings, where the object was to hold a glut of hedgerow fruit until winter by whatever barrier came cheapest. The darioles that follow show the other face of the same book: a small French entremets of pastry-lined custard cups, the sort of thing a cook with a good range and a set of tin moulds was expected to send up at the end of dinner.