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Stewed Plums
Place in a saucepan with a pint of cold water eighteen to twenty ripe peeled plums cut into halves and stoned, and add half a pound of granulated sugar; put the pan on the stove, and when boiling skim thoroughly and cook for five minutes, stirring gradually from the bottom to avoid mashing the fruit. Take the pan from the fire, and add at once a gill of red curacoa, mixing well for about half a minute; pour the fruit into a bowl, let it cool, and serve on a dish.
A plain compote in heavy syrup, finished off the heat with liqueur. The only difficult parts are the archaic measures and the fact that the fruit is barely cooked on purpose.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. That is a generous amount of liqueur for eighteen to twenty plums; a quarter cup still perfumes the syrup if you want the fruit to taste of fruit.
- Half a pound of sugarAbout 1 1/8 cups granulated. With a pint of water this gives roughly a 1:2 sugar-to-water syrup by volume, sweet by modern standards but it is what holds the plum halves intact.
- Red curaçaoRed curacao -- A curacao is an orange liqueur; the red version was the same spirit tinted, and it is now very hard to find. Use any decent orange liqueur, and add a spoonful of grenadine if you want the colour back.
- Five minutes means five minutesThis is the hinge. Plums collapse into jam quickly in hot syrup, so they start in cold water, are skimmed as soon as they boil, and get only the five minutes of cooking. Firm-fleshed varieties such as Italian prune plums hold up best; very ripe soft ones may need less.
- PeelingRipe plums peel much more easily after 15 to 20 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water, as with peaches. Skins left on will curl away from the flesh in the syrup and look untidy, which may be why the recipe specifies peeled fruit.
- Stirring "gradually from the bottom"Lift the fruit with a spoon rather than stirring in circles, so the halves at the base do not sit against the pan and break up. A wide pan in a single layer makes this easier than a deep one.
- SkimmingThe scum is froth carrying fruit particles rather than any impurity, but taking it off keeps the syrup clear. Skim as soon as it boils, before it gets stirred back in.
- Adding the liqueur off the heatBoth the alcohol and the orange aroma go up the flue if it is added while the pan is boiling. Half a minute of gentle mixing is enough to distribute it.
- Yield and servingEighteen to twenty plums serve six as a dessert or eight alongside cream or a plain cake. Served cold, with the syrup spooned over; it keeps several days covered in the refrigerator and improves overnight.
Stewed fruit in heavy syrup, finished with a spoon of liqueur, was standard restaurant dessert practice when Oscar Tschirky compiled this book in 1896 -- inexpensive, made ahead, and endlessly adaptable to whatever came in from the market. Curaçao took its name from the Caribbean island whose bitter laraha oranges supplied the peel, and by the late nineteenth century it was produced in Holland and France in white, orange, green and red versions, the colour being a matter of presentation rather than flavour. The red bottling suits a dish like this one, where a plain fruit compote needed to look like something in a dining room.