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Plum Jelly
If plums are wild (not cultivated) put in pan and sprinkle with soda and pour hot water over them, let stand a few moments and stir through them; take out and put on with water just to cover, or less if plums are very juicy; boil till soft, dip out juice with a china cup; then strain the rest through small salt-bags (by the way, keep them for jelly-bags as they are just the thing), do not squeeze them. Take pound for pound of juice and sugar, or pint for pint, and boil for eight or ten minutes. Jelly will be nicer if only one measure or a measure and a half is made at one time; if more, boil longer; some boil juice ten or fifteen minutes, then add sugar and boil five minutes longer. It can be tested by dropping in a saucer and placing on ice or in a cool place; if it does not spread but remains rounded it is finished. If the plums are the cultivated wild plum, make as above without using the soda. Take the plums that are left and press through a sieve, then take pint for pint of sugar and pulp, boiling the latter half an hour and then adding sugar, boiling ten or fifteen minutes more. Half a pint sugar to a pint, makes a rich marmalade, and one-third pint to pint, boiling it longer, is nice canned, and used for pies, adding milk, eggs and sugar as for squash pies.
Plum-apple jelly may be made by preparing the juice of apples and plums as above (a nice proportion is one part plums to two parts apples; for instance, one peck of plums to two pecks apples); then mixing the juice and finish without flavoring. The marmalade is made in the same way as above. Some add a little ginger root to it. One bushel of apples and one peck of plums make forty pints of jelly, part crab-apple and part mixed, and sixteen quart glass cans of mixed marmalade. In making either kind of jelly the fruit may be squeezed and the juice strained twice through swiss or crinoline and made into jelly. The pulp can not then be used for marmalade.
A working jelly recipe from the era before commercial pectin, when wild plums did the setting work themselves. The instructions assume you know how to test a set by eye; everything else is quantity and judgement.
- The soda soakSoda and hot water on wild plums was a standard first step for tart, tough-skinned gathered fruit; the book does not say why, and it may have been meant to clean the fruit or to take the edge off the skins. The recipe has you lift the plums out of the soda water afterwards. Use a scant teaspoon of baking soda in a basin of hot water, then rinse thoroughly in cold water so no soda carries into the pan, where it would flatten the acidity the set depends on.
- Wild plums set themselvesWild and semi-wild plums are high in both pectin and acid, which is why no added pectin appears here. Cultivated dessert plums, especially fully ripe ones, are markedly lower in both; include a proportion of underripe fruit or expect a soft set.
- Measures"Pound for pound or pint for pint" of juice and sugar is the classic ratio and works out roughly the same either way. A peck of plums or apples is roughly 10-12 lb, a bushel four pecks, so the yield note describes somewhere around 40-50 lb of apples and 10-12 lb of plums producing forty pints of jelly ‑ a farm-scale day's work.
- Small batchesThe book advises making only "one measure or a measure and a half" at a time, presumably the pint measure used elsewhere in the recipe, and the principle still holds. Large volumes take so long to reach setting point that the pectin degrades and the colour darkens; a wide pan and 4 to 6 cups of juice per batch is the modern equivalent.
- Jelly bagsClean cotton salt bags were the period's jelly bag. Any close-woven unbleached cotton or a double layer of muslin works. The instruction not to squeeze is the one that matters most: pressure forces fine pulp through and gives a cloudy jelly.
- The saucer testChill two or three small plates in the freezer beforehand. Drop a spoonful on a cold plate, wait half a minute, then push it with a finger; a set is reached when the surface wrinkles and the drop holds its dome. On a thermometer this is around 220F at sea level.
- Marmalade from the leftover pulpWhat the book calls marmalade is closer to a plum butter: it thickens and darkens, so use a heavy pan and stir often once the sugar is in – the half-hour of pulp boiling before sugar goes in reduces the water and prevents scorching later.
- CanningNineteenth-century jelly was poured into glasses and sealed with paraffin or a paper cover. Follow current water-bath canning directions for jars, headspace and processing time if you intend to store it at room temperature; refrigerate anything you do not process.
- The pie noteThe one-third-sugar version thinned with milk, eggs and sugar "as for squash pies" gives a custard pie, baked until just set in the centre – not a fruit pie in the modern sense.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed household receipts, and this entry reads exactly like one: a single experienced cook working through everything a glut of fruit can be turned into, from clear jelly down to the sieved pulp and on to pie filling. Wild plums — the various native American Prunus, chiefly the American and Chickasaw plums — were gathered rather than bought across the South and Midwest, and their sharpness and high pectin made them the standard jelly fruit long before boxed pectin appeared in the 1910s. The plum-apple combination is thrift as much as flavour: apples stretched the more strongly flavoured plums and reinforced the set, and the note that one bushel of apples and one peck of plums yields forty pints tells you this was preserving on the scale of a season's supply, not an afternoon's.</p>