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Euchered Plums
Nine pounds blue plums, six pounds sugar, two quarts vinegar, • one ounce cinnamon; boil vinegar, sugar and spice together, pour over plums, draw off next morning and boil, pour back on plums, repeat the boiling five mornings, the last time boiling the fruit about twenty minutes. -Mrs. Capt. W. B. Brown, Washington City.
A classic open-kettle sweet pickle: the syrup is drained, boiled and returned to the fruit on five successive mornings, which draws the plums slowly toward the syrup's density instead of shocking them. The point of the whole method is to keep the skins whole and the flesh plump rather than shriveled.
- The hinge: don't boil the fruit until the endFor the first four mornings only the syrup goes into the pot; the plums sit in a crock or bowl and are simply covered with the hot liquid. Boiling the fruit early collapses the skins and you end up with plum jam in vinegar.
- Which plums"Blue plums" here probably means damsons or the small oval Italian prune plums, both firm and tart with clingy skins. This style is traditionally made with the stones left in; prick each plum once or twice with a needle so the skins vent instead of splitting.
- The cinnamonOne ounce is roughly 8-10 broken cassia sticks; stick cinnamon is the likely intent, since ground would cloud the syrup and never fully dissolve. Tie it in cheesecloth so it can be lifted out on the last morning.
- Vinegar strengthModern cider vinegar is standardized at 5 percent acidity; nineteenth-century household vinegar was inconsistent in strength, which may be part of why old recipes use so much of it. Two quarts of 5 percent vinegar against nine pounds of fruit and six pounds of sugar gives a firmly acidic, distinctly sharp pickle.
- VesselsUse stainless steel or enameled cast iron for the boiling and glass, glazed stoneware or stainless for the overnight soaks. Bare aluminum, copper and iron react with vinegar and will throw off both color and flavor.
- The five morningsPlan on six days start to finish. Keep the crock covered and, in a warm kitchen, refrigerate it between boilings rather than leaving it on the counter as the original assumed a cool pantry would allow.
- Storage, which the original omitsThe recipe stops at the last twenty minutes of boiling and says nothing about sealing; presumably the finished plums went into a stone jar in a cool cellar. Follow a current tested procedure for packing and water-bath processing sweet pickled fruit in jars, or simply keep the finished plums refrigerated and eat them within a few weeks.
- Yield and useThe original gives no yield; the quantities are large, so plan on a good many pints. Served in small quantities alongside roast pork, ham, game or cold meats, and the leftover syrup is worth keeping for glazing.
Sweet pickled fruit sat squarely between the condiment and the dessert course on a nineteenth-century American table, and blue plums, cheap and abundant in late summer, were among the most common candidates along with peaches, pears and crabapples. The repeated-morning method was a common one for whole-fruit pickles and preserves before reliable jar seals: each day's reboiling concentrated the syrup a little and coaxed sugar into the fruit gradually, so the plums kept their shape and the sugar-acid concentration eventually rose high enough to hold them through the winter. The odd name is generally taken as a joke on euchre, the card game that was something close to a national pastime in the 1870s and 1880s, where to be "euchered" was to be outwitted or thwarted -- these plums having been thoroughly outmaneuvered over five mornings. Like much of The Dixie Cook Book, the recipe arrives with a contributor's name and city attached, in the manner of the community cookbooks that shaped it: Mrs. Capt. W. B. Brown of Washington City is identified by her husband's rank as well as his initials, a common convention for married women's names in print.