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Plums, to Preserve Dry
INGREDIENTS. To every lb. of sugar allow pint of water.
Gather the plums when they are full grown and just turning colour; prick them, put them into a saucepan of cold water and set them on the fire until the water is on the point of boiling.
Then take them out, drain them, and boil them gently in syrup made with the above proportion of sugar and water; and if the plums shrink and will not take the sugar, prick them as they lie in the pan; give them another boil, skim and set them by. The next PLUMS. day add some more sugar, boiled almost to candy, to the fruit and syrup; put all together into a wide-mouthed jar and place them in a cool oven for 2 nights; then drain the plums from the syrup, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and dry them in a cool oven.
TIME.-15 to 20 minutes to boil the plums in the syrup.
SEASONABLE from August to October.
This is candied fruit by the slow method: blanch, steep in progressively heavier syrup, then dry. The whole thing turns on the syrup being strengthened in stages rather than all at once.
- The syrup proportion is garbledThe line reads "To every lb. of sugar allow pint of water," with the fraction apparently dropped from the text. Half a pint of water to the pound of sugar would suit this style of dry preserve; a full pint gives a thinner syrup than the method seems to want.
- "Boiled almost to candy""Boiled almost to candy" means sugar boiled well past syrup, towards the point where it would set hard on cooling; the book gives no temperature, so any thermometer figure is an estimate. It is added to the pan of fruit and thin syrup to raise the overall sugar concentration, not poured over as a coating.
- "A cool oven""A cool oven" in Victorian terms is the coolest part of the range; no temperature is stated, but a low oven of roughly 200-250F is the usual modern reading. Use the lowest setting available, ideally with the door propped, or a dehydrator at 135-150F. Too much heat will colour the sugar and scorch the skins.
- Two nights in the ovenThis assumes a coal range holding residual warmth overnight. A modern oven cannot be left on for two nights unattended; the practical equivalent is repeated warm-and-rest cycles of a few hours over two days, with the jar left in a warm dry place between them.
- Pick the fruit underripe"Full grown and just turning colour" matters. Ripe plums collapse in syrup and will not hold their shape through repeated boiling. Firm, barely blushing damsons, greengages or small dessert plums work; soft supermarket stone fruit does not.
- Pricking, and why the plums shrinkPiercing the skin lets syrup in and steam out. If the fruit wrinkles and refuses to plump, the sugar is not penetrating fast enough to replace the water leaving it, hence the instruction to prick again in the pan and give another boil.
- Don't boil hardThe 15 to 20 minutes is a gentle simmer. A rolling boil splits skins and loosens stones, and the plums will come out of the jar as jam.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantity of fruit, so no yield can be stated. Store the dried plums between sheets of paper in a tin somewhere cool and dry; if they weep or feel tacky they need more drying time.
Dry preserving " candying fruit and then drying it rather than keeping it under liquid " was the older of the two English methods and by Beeton's day the more old-fashioned. Sugar was expensive enough in earlier centuries that fruit put down this way is generally thought to have counted as a luxury, and the technique is often traced to the sugared "suckets" of much earlier confectionery. Beeton's edition keeps it, and the finished fruit needed no jars, wax or storage space of the kind a wet preserve demanded. The August-to-October season points to English orchard plums " damsons, greengages, Victorias " all of which ripen in a short glut and had to be dealt with quickly. The instruction to use a cool oven "for 2 nights" is a reminder of how a kitchen range worked: the fire was banked at night and the ovens held a low, falling heat that cost nothing and was ideal for drying.