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Pickled Plums
Select plums not too ripe, prick them well all over with a fork, arrange them in layers in a jar with cinnamon and cloves and orange-peel between each layer, cover over with vinegar, and soak them in this for twenty-four hours, at the end of which time stain off the vinegar into a saucepan, boil it up quickly for about ten minutes, and let it become cool, then pour it over the fruit. After the lapse of twenty-four hours again strain the vinegar, boil it for ten minutes with some sugar, six ounces to every quart of the liquid, pour it over the fruit, and leave it until cold. Cover the jars with stout paper, tie securely, and keep them in a dry place.
Preserved American or Siberian Crab-Apples Gather the apples just prior to their becoming ripe, select carefully, cut the stems short, and then plunge the fruit into boiling-water for a few minutes until the skin of any one of them begins to crack. Take from the fire, strain through an earthenware colander, and they may then be easily peeled. Great care must be taken when peeling the apples to keep them very clean and perfect in shape. Before starting to do this make a thin syrup of one pound of loaf sugar to about one pint of water, and keep it boiling hot until all the apples are peeled and dropped into a large glass jar. When a sufficient number are done pour the hot syrup over them, and store away in a cool pantry. The following day strain off again, place the syrup in a stewpan with one-fourth pound more sugar to each pint; then boil and skim. Return the apples to the jar and pour the hot syrup over a second time. If on the day following the syrup looks clear, and the fruit is soft, they may be considered ready for tying down, though there will be no harm in repeating the boiling process once or twice more in order to insure immunity from mould.
Two nineteenth-century preserving methods printed as one entry: a spiced vinegar plum pickle and a sugar-syrup crab apple preserve. Both rely on a storage method that no current preserving authority accepts, so read them as documents rather than as working instructions.
- The paper cover is the problemThe plum recipe finishes by tying stout paper over the jar and keeping it in a dry place; the crab apples are only 'tied down' and stored in a cool pantry. Paper is not a hermetic seal: it admits air, mould spores and insects, and nothing in either recipe brings the sealed jar to a processing temperature. The crab apples sit in sugar syrup at room temperature for days while being repeatedly opened, strained and re-poured. Use a current, tested water-bath canning recipe if you want to put up plums or crab apples.
- The author knew it was marginalThe closing line about repeating the boiling 'once or twice more in order to insure immunity from mould' shows mould was a recognised risk, and the remedy offered — more boiling, then inspecting the jars and discarding what had furred over — is not an adequate control.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in a hard cone or block, broken and crushed for use. It is ordinary granulated white sugar by any modern measure — the loaf form simply indicated purity before granulated sugar was universally available.
- Six ounces to the quartWeight against volume, as English and American preserving books both did. Six ounces of sugar is a scant cup, to a quart of vinegar — a sharp, lightly sweetened pickle rather than a syrup, closer to a German Essigpflaume than to a modern sweet pickled plum.
- Earthenware colanderSpecified in the crab-apple recipe, where the fruit is strained straight out of boiling water; the book gives no reason, though unlined metal does react with hot fruit acids. Modern stainless steel, glass and enamel are all fine; avoid untinned copper, aluminium and cast iron with anything this acidic.
- Why the plums are prickedPiercing the skin lets the vinegar penetrate and helps stop the fruit bursting when hot liquid is poured over; skip it and you get tough-skinned plums swimming in unflavoured vinegar.
- Siberian crab applesMalus baccata and its hybrids — small, hard, intensely tart fruit, often barely an inch across, still grown ornamentally. Anything sold today as a crab apple will behave similarly: high in pectin and acid, and worth peeling only if you want the whole-fruit presentation this recipe is after.
- Repeated straining and reboilingThe syrup is drawn off, concentrated with more sugar, and returned each day so the fruit takes up sugar gradually without collapsing. It is a genuine technique — the same logic behind candied fruit — but it depends on the fruit sitting exposed in syrup between rounds, which is precisely the part that will not pass now.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) ran to roughly nine hundred pages and swept in a great deal of general household material alongside the hotel's own dishes; these two preserving entries read like the domestic-manual tradition of the period rather than anything a Waldorf kitchen would have executed in volume. Spiced vinegar plums belong to a long European line of sweet-sour fruit pickles served with cold meat and game hat English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, and which survives in the German Essigpflaume and the Scandinavian pickled-fruit relishes. The crab apple preserve reflects a fruit that mattered far more to nineteenth-century American households than it does now: too sour to eat out of hand, abundant, rich in pectin, and therefore reliably turned into jelly, sauce or whole preserved fruit. Both recipes date from the years just before home canning was systematised; the USDA's tested processing guidelines lay decades in the future, and the standard of success was simply whether the jar had grown mould by the time you opened it.