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Spiced Plums
Make a syrup, allowing a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit, and a scanty pint of vinegar to every three pounds of sugar. To each peck of plums allow a tablespoon of ground cinnamon, one tablespoon of cloves, one tablespoon of mace and one tablespoon of allspice. Prick each plum, add the spices to the syrup, and pour the latter, boiling hot, over the fruit. Let the whole stand three days, then skim out the plums, boil down the syrup until quite thick, and pour it hot over the plums. Set away in a stone jar.
A sweet pickle in the old style: the fruit is never cooked, only steeped in boiling syrup over several days so it stays whole. The proportions are given as ratios, which makes scaling easy once the archaic units are settled.
- A peck of plumsA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 14 lb of plums. The spice quantities are pegged to that volume, so for a more manageable 3 lb of fruit use about three-quarters teaspoon of each spice.
- The two ratiosSugar equals the weight of the fruit; vinegar is a scant pint (about 1 3/4 cups) per 3 lb of sugar. For 3 lb of plums that is 3 lb sugar and a scant pint of vinegar.
- Which vinegarCider vinegar is the usual modern choice; the recipe itself specifies neither type nor strength. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied considerably in strength, so do not use anything notably weak; the acid is doing preservative work alongside the sugar.
- Which plumsSmall firm varieties hold up best. Damsons, Italian prunes and greengages are among the plums named in period spiced-fruit recipes; large soft dessert plums collapse in the syrup.
- Pricking is not optionalPiercing each plum two or three times with a needle lets the syrup penetrate and, more importantly, keeps the skins from bursting and the fruit from shrivelling into leather. Skip it and you get wrinkled plums floating in thin syrup.
- Whole spices are betterGround cinnamon, cloves, mace and allspice will cloud the syrup and settle as grit. Tie the equivalent in stick cinnamon, whole cloves, blade mace and whole allspice in muslin and lift it out before the final boil.
- The three-day standThe point is osmosis: the syrup draws liquid from the fruit and gradually replaces it with sugar, which is why the syrup thins and needs boiling down at the end. Some cooks repeated the drain-boil-pour cycle for three days running, which gives a firmer plum.
- Boiling down the syrupReduce until it sheets from a spoon or reaches about 220F, the point at which it will set to a thick pourable syrup when cold. Pour it over the plums hot.
- A stone jar is not shelf storageThe original assumes a cold cellar and a glazed crock, and the jar is neither sealed nor heat-processed. Refrigerate the finished plums and eat them within a few weeks, or follow a current tested canning recipe if you want them shelf stable. Old lead-glazed stoneware should never be used with anything this acidic.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of plums with their syrup will fill roughly three pint jars, depending on how tightly they pack. Usually served cold as a relish with ham, roast pork, goose or cold cuts.
Spiced or pickled fruit sat squarely in the sweet-and-sour tradition that ran through English and American cookery well into the twentieth century, where a sharp, sugary preserve was expected alongside cold meat much as chutney or cranberry sauce is today. The technique here, pouring boiling syrup over raw fruit and repeating the process over several days, was used for spiced peaches, pears, crab apples and watermelon rind as well, and it has the advantage of sweetening fruit through without cooking it to mush. The Butterick Cook Book was published by the dress-pattern firm as part of its stable of domestic manuals for American housewives. Plums were an obvious candidate: damsons are tart and small, and they crop heavily enough that a peck at a time was a plausible quantity for a household putting up its autumn stores.