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Damson Preserves
Wipe damsons with a piece of cheese-cloth wrung out of cold water, and prick each fruit five or six times, using a large needle; then weigh. Make a syrup by boiling threefourths their weight in sugar with water, allowing one cup to each pound of sugar. As soon as syrup reaches boilingpoint, skim, and add plums, a few at a time, that fruit may better keep in shape during cooking. Cook until soft. It is well to use two kettles, that work may be more quickly done, and syrup need not cook too long a time. Put into glass or stone jars.
A straightforward whole-fruit preserve that depends on two things the original states almost in passing: pricking the skins, and not letting the syrup cook down too long. Both are about keeping the plums whole.
- Prick every plumDamson skins are tough and will burst and slip if steam has nowhere to go. Five or six deep punctures with a trussing or darning needle is the hinge of the whole recipe; skipping it gives you jam, not preserves.
- The stones stay inDamsons cling hard to their pits and this recipe does not ask you to remove them. Warn whoever eats them.
- Sugar and water ratioThree-quarters the weight of the fruit in sugar: 4 lb damsons takes 3 lb sugar and 3 cups water, since the recipe allows one cup of water per pound of sugar.
- Two kettles means small batchesThe recipe's stated reason for the second pan is speed, so that the syrup need not cook too long while the last plums soften. Cook the fruit in two or three loads and return them all to the finished syrup.
- Judging "cook until soft"Roughly fifteen to twenty-five minutes at a gentle boil, depending on ripeness; the recipe judges doneness by the fruit, not by the syrup, and warns against cooking the syrup too long.
- Jars, then and now"Glass or stone jars" would have meant screw-top glass jars or a glazed stoneware crock, commonly sealed with paraffin, which is no longer considered a sound closure. Fill clean hot half-pint or pint jars, leaving a quarter-inch of headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes; damsons are high in both acid and pectin, so they set and keep well.
- SkimmingSkim the syrup when it first boils, as directed, and again before jarring. The foam is protein and orchard dust, and it clouds an otherwise clear, garnet-colored preserve.
Damsons are Prunus insititia, a small, dusky, astringent plum whose name is generally traced to "damascene," the plum of Damascus, and they were long grown in dooryards and hedgerows for exactly this purpose: too sour and tannic to eat out of hand, superb under sugar. Their high acid and pectin made them a reliable fruit in the nineteenth-century preserving closet, setting firmly with no added pectin at a time when none was commercially available. Whole-fruit preserves like these were distinguished from jam by the cook's success in keeping each plum intact.