Home › Pickles and Relishes › Spiced Plums
Spiced Plums
4 quarts plums 3 pounds sugar 1 pint vinegar 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon 1 tablespoon cloves 1 tablespoon allspice Make a sirup from the vinegar, sugar and spices. Boil for five minutes. Prick each plum with a fork and pour the boiling sirup over the fruit. Let the whole stand three days, then skim out the plums, boil down the sirup until quite thick, add the plums and heat to boiling. Seal in clean, hot jars.
A sweet-sour spiced fruit pickle of the old open-kettle school, meant to be served alongside meat rather than eaten as jam. Most of what needs updating is the sealing step and the spice handling.
- YieldFour quarts of whole plums with syrup fills roughly six to seven pint jars. Pack the fruit fairly snugly and top with syrup, leaving half an inch of headspace.
- Which plumsSmall firm plums hold their shape best: damsons, Italian prune plums, or greengages. (Only the Italian prune plum is reliably freestone; damsons and greengages tend to cling to the stone.) Fully ripe dessert plums are likely to collapse into the syrup during the second boiling.
- Pricking is not optionalThe fork holes let syrup in and let steam out, which is the difference between plums that stay whole and plums that split and shed their skins. Prick each one in several places, right through to the stone.
- The three-day standUse a nonreactive crock, glass or stainless bowl, cover it, and keep it somewhere cool. The vinegar and heavy sugar do the preserving during this stage; the fruit slowly gives up juice and takes on syrup, which is why the syrup then needs boiling down.
- Vinegar strengthA pint of ordinary cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what this needs. Do not substitute a low-acid or diluted "drinking" vinegar, since the acid is doing preservation work as well as flavoring.
- Ground versus whole spiceThree tablespoons of ground spice will leave the syrup muddy and gritty. Equivalent whole spices tied in a cheesecloth bag give a clear syrup: two or three 3-inch cinnamon sticks, a tablespoon of whole cloves and a tablespoon of whole allspice berries, removed before jarring.
- Sealing"Seal in clean, hot jars" is the open-kettle method, which is no longer considered reliable. Fill hot jars with the boiling fruit and syrup, apply two-piece lids, and process in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes, adjusting for altitude; or skip processing entirely and keep the jars in the refrigerator, where they will hold for a couple of months.
- Boiling down the syrupReduce until it sheets thickly off a spoon; around 220F is a useful guide. Undercooked syrup makes a thin, watery pickle, and a syrup taken well past that point may set firm in the jar once cold.
- ServingGive the jars a month before opening so the spice settles into the fruit. Serve cold or at room temperature with ham, pork, roast goose or cold cuts.
Spiced fruit occupies a specific place on the pre-refrigeration table: sugar and vinegar together preserved the late-summer glut, and the resulting sharp-sweet plums, peaches or pears were set out as a relish with rich roasted and salted meats. The technique is older than the book by centuries and is close kin to English spiced damsons and to German pickled plums, in which fruit is steeped repeatedly in a syrup that is drawn off and reboiled until it thickens. New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick publishing house at the end of the 1920s, when home canning was still a common annual chore and a chapter of pickles and relishes was expected of a general cookbook. The three-day steep here is a shorter version of the older practice of pouring off and reboiling the syrup on several successive days, a method that spread the work across a week and kept the fruit intact.