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Plums in Brandy
Use eight pounds of half ripe plums, prick them all over and place over the fire in cold water as soon as the water boils and the fruit rises to the surface, take out with a skimmer and lay them in a pan of cold water. Then clarify two pounds of loaf sugar, boil it to the little thread, put in the plums and boil, then remove them from the pan and let them stand in their syrup over night. The next day take them out of the syrup, boil this once and put the plums in again and boil once more, then let them stand all night. Repeat this operation the next day and the following day, drain the plums and put them into bottles, boil the syrup to candy height, let it cool, and when quite cold, add to it three-fourths of its own quantity of the best brandy, mix thoroughly with the syrup, strain it and pour it over the plums. Cork the bottles thoroughly.
A four-day brandied-fruit preserve of the French kind, written in the sugar-boiler's shorthand of the period. The instructions are sound, but two of the key terms are stages of cooked sugar rather than measurements.
- The hinge: syrup strength, not timeThe point of boiling the syrup and returning the fruit over four days is osmotic — sugar enters the plums gradually so they stay plump instead of shrivelling and going leathery. Rushing it into one long boil is the one change that ruins the result.
- "The little thread"An early sugar stage, roughly 215-220F, where a drop pulled between finger and thumb spins a short thread. On a thermometer, take the syrup just past 215F and no further at this point.
- "Candy height" is ambiguous hereIn older confectionery writing "candy height" can mean anything from hard ball to the crack stage, 250F up to 310F. Taken literally at the high end the syrup would set solid on cooling and could not be poured, so the intention is almost certainly the lower end. Treat the figure as unreliable and judge by pourability once cold.
- Loaf sugar and clarifyingLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated sugar is its equivalent. The clarifying step existed to lift scum and impurities with egg white and is unnecessary with modern sugar — simply dissolve it in water and skim if needed.
- Half-ripe plumsFirm, barely-ripe fruit is essential; ripe plums disintegrate over four days of boiling. Damsons, greengages and small Italian prune plums hold their shape best. Pricking all over with a needle lets syrup in and keeps the skins from bursting.
- The blanchThe plums go into cold water and are lifted out as soon as it reaches the boil and they rise; the whole thing is a blanch, not a cooking step. Take them out the moment they float and drop them into cold water to stop the skins splitting.
- Brandy proportion and keepingThree-fourths of the syrup's volume in brandy puts the finished liquid somewhere around 17-20 percent alcohol, which together with the sugar is what preserves the fruit. Use sterilised jars or bottles rather than reused corks, keep them covered by liquid, and store cool and dark; refrigerate once opened.
- YieldEight pounds of plums with two pounds of sugar will fill several pint jars, depending on how closely they are packed. The proportion of sugar to fruit is lower than in many modern brandied-fruit recipes, so expect a tarter result.
Brandied fruit of this type belongs to the French confectioner's tradition of prunes à l'eau-de-vie, and the repeated boil-and-rest method is close to the one used for candied and glacé fruit, the fruit here being bottled in spirit instead of taken on to the drying stage. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms, published his Cook Book in 1896, and preserves like this belonged to the pantry rather than the range. The sugar stages named here — thread, candy height — were the working vocabulary of a trained confectioner at a time when kitchen thermometers were not yet standard, and their vagueness on the page reflects skills that were assumed rather than taught.