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Wild Plum Leather
Cook wild plums, drain off juice and use, sweetened, for drinks. Rub cooked plum pulp through a colander and spread on clean boards to dry. When dried it's ready for use or for storing away like cord wood, and when needed just soak it soft, like a hunk of codfish, add sugar and use it just as it is for plum butter, or filling for cookies, pies, pancakes, or almost anything.
A two-part recipe: the drained juice becomes a cordial, the pulp becomes fruit leather. The whole thing turns on drying the puree thin enough and fast enough that it dehydrates rather than ferments.
- Wild plumsAmerican wild plums (Prunus americana and relatives) are small, thick-skinned, very tart and high in pectin, which gives the dried pulp a pliable body without added thickener, though the sheet forms chiefly because it is dried. Damsons or unripe Italian prune plums behave similarly; supermarket dessert plums are sweeter and wetter and will need longer drying.
- Drying on boardsSpreading puree on bare planks in the sun is the historical method and depends on hot, dry, breezy weather and constant attention to insects. Indoors, spread the puree about 1/8 inch thick on parchment or a silicone sheet and dry at 135-150F in a dehydrator, or at the lowest setting your oven allows with the door propped, for 6-10 hours.
- How to tell it is doneThe sheet should be leathery and tacky but lift cleanly from the surface with no wet or glossy patches in the middle. Any soft spot left in the centre is where mould starts.
- "Like cord wood"Stacking depends on the sheets being dry enough not to weld together. Roll each sheet in parchment before storing, keep it airtight, and refrigerate or freeze if you want more than a few months.
- Soaking it softThe codfish comparison overstates it. A short soak in just enough hot water to cover, or a few minutes' gentle simmering, will bring the leather back to a thick puree; too much water gives you thin sauce rather than plum butter.
- SweeteningNo sugar goes into the leather itself, which is why it tastes sharp; it keeps because it is dried, not because sugar is absent. Sweeten only at the point of use, after reconstituting, and taste as you go — wild plums vary enormously in acidity from tree to tree.
- The juiceThe drained juice is the by-product, not an afterthought. Sweetened and diluted it makes a refreshing drink, as the recipe suggests; boiled with sugar it can be made into jelly, wild plums being rich in pectin.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As a rough guide, a few pounds of whole plums will yield a few cups of sieved pulp — enough for one or two baking-sheet-sized leathers — but the yield varies with pit size and how much juice has been drained off.