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Spiced Plums
4 quarts plums
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
3 pounds sugar
1 tablespoon cloves
1 pint vinegar
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 vinegar pickle of the old English type, built on repeated soaking rather than long boiling so the plums keep their shape. Two things need updating: how the spices are handled, and how the jars are finished.
- Prick every plumThis is the hinge. Unpricked plums burst and shed their skins into the syrup the moment boiling liquid hits them. Two or three deep punctures with a fork or skewer let the syrup in and the steam out, and the fruit stays whole through both heatings.
- Quantities in modern termsFour quarts of plums is a volume measure, roughly 5 to 6 lb of whole fruit. Three pounds of sugar is about 6 3/4 cups; a pint of vinegar is 2 cups. Use cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is the standard strength on any supermarket shelf.
- Use whole spices insteadThree tablespoons of ground spice will leave the syrup muddy and gritty. Substitute a 3-inch cinnamon stick, 1 tablespoon whole cloves and 1 tablespoon whole allspice berries, tied in a square of muslin, and lift the bag out before jarring.
- The three-day standThis is osmosis, not fermentation: the syrup draws juice from the fruit and the fruit takes up sugar, which is why the plums firm up rather than collapse. Keep the bowl covered and, in a modern warm kitchen, refrigerate it; a period pantry would have been cooler than a heated modern kitchen.
- Boiling down the syrupAfter the plums are lifted out, the syrup will be thin with the juice they gave up. Reduce it until it sheets off a spoon, roughly 220F on a thermometer, then return the fruit and bring just to a boil. Longer than that and the skins go leathery.
- Sealing is the outdated step"Seal in clean, hot jars" is open-kettle canning, abandoned decades ago because the seal is unreliable and the jar contents are never held at temperature. Pack into hot sterilised jars leaving 1/2 inch headspace and process pints in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes, or skip processing entirely and keep the jars in the refrigerator, where they hold for a couple of months.
- Which plumsSmall firm freestone or clingstone varieties work best: damsons, Italian prune plums, greengages. Large soft dessert plums turn to pulp on the second heating.
- Yield and servingYield varies with how closely the fruit packs; expect several pints. Let them sit at least a month before opening so the spice and vinegar settle into the fruit. They are a condiment, not a dessert: cold ham, roast pork, game, cheddar.
Spiced or pickled fruit sat on nineteenth-century American tables the way chutney sat on British ones, and the technique came over from English kitchens, where damsons, pears and cherries had long been put down in sweetened vinegar with the warming spices of the old trade routes: cinnamon, clove, allspice. The method here, with its boiling syrup poured over the fruit and a stand of three days, is the classic sweet-pickle procedure and was applied almost interchangeably to peaches, crabapples and watermelon rind. The Butterick book, issued by a pattern company to the same audience it sold dress patterns to, treats this as ordinary end-of-summer work: plums came in cheap by the bushel in late August and September, and a shelf of spiced fruit gave a household something bright to serve alongside the cold and salted meats that carried it through winter.