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Preserved Plums or Green Gages
2 quarts plums or gages 1 cup water 1 quart sugar Prick the fruit; put it in a preserving kettle, cover well with water; boil five minutes and drain. Bring the sugar and water to a boil; boil five minutes and skim. Add the plums or green gages; cook for twenty minutes; put into sterilized jars and seal.
A straightforward whole-fruit preserve in heavy syrup. The only real decisions are the sugar measure, which is given by volume, and how the filled jars are sealed.
- A quart of sugarSugar was measured by volume in this book: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 12 oz to 2 lb of granulated sugar. Against 2 quarts of fruit that is a heavy syrup, which is what keeps the plums firm and glossy rather than collapsing into jam.
- Green gagesGreengages are a small, round, yellow-green dessert plum with dense flesh and high sugar. Any firm, slightly underripe plum works; fully soft fruit will burst no matter how carefully it is handled.
- Prick the fruitThis is the hinge. Each plum needs several deep punctures with a needle or fine skewer so steam escapes and syrup enters; unpricked fruit splits its skin in the first minutes of boiling and the preserve turns cloudy with shreds.
- The blanch and drainThe initial five-minute boil in plain water softens and sets the skins before the fruit meets the syrup. Drain thoroughly, or the retained water will thin the syrup.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled — rather than bare cast iron, which reacts with fruit acid. Width matters more than depth so the syrup reduces evenly and the fruit sits in a shallow layer.
- Judging the twenty minutesTwenty minutes at a gentle boil is about right for medium plums, but go by the syrup: it should sheet from a spoon and read around 220F on a thermometer. Boil harder or longer and the fruit shrivels.
- Sealing"Put into sterilized jars and seal" is open-kettle canning, standard practice when this book was written and no longer recommended even for high-acid fruit, since the seal is unproven and mould can take hold. Current practice is to fill hot jars, leave headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for the time your jar size and altitude require; follow a present-day canning guide for those figures.
- YieldTwo quarts of whole plums in syrup will fill something in the region of four pint jars, depending on how tightly the fruit packs.
The greengage is generally traced to Sir William Gage, an English gentleman of the early eighteenth century who is said to have received the plum from France, where it is still called Reine Claude after the queen consort of François I. By the time Mrs. Fryer was writing, the gage was a prized late-summer fruit with a short season, which is exactly why it turns up here rather than in a dessert chapter: a canning section in an American household book of this period exists to catch gluts, and stone fruit arrived in a rush and spoiled quickly. Whole fruit suspended in heavy syrup — as against jam or butter — was among the more prized forms of preserving, because it kept the shape and identity of the fruit intact and could be served as a dish in its own right with cream or cold meat.