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Plum Sweetmeats
When Damson plums are perfectly ripe, peel and divide them, taking out the stones; put them over a gentle heat to cook in their own juice; when soft rub them through a sieve, and return to the stove, adding just enough sugar to sweeten, a little cinnamon, and, when nearly done, wine in quantity to suit the taste. This is done more to keep the sweetmeats than for the flavor, as self-sealing cans are not used here , and all preserves are pasted up with the white of eggs. The common wine of the country is thin and sour and is much used in cookery. - Mrs. L. S. Williston, Heidelberg, Germany.
This is a plum butter rather than a jam: the fruit is cooked down, sieved and sweetened lightly. The instructions are loose by design, and the one part that should not be followed is the sealing.
- Skip the peelingDamsons are small and cling to their stones, and peeling them raw is laborious. Cook them whole in their own juice until collapsed, then push everything through a sieve or food mill, which removes skins and stones in one pass. The skins also carry much of the pectin and colour.
- "Gentle heat"Low and slow, with a heavy pan and frequent stirring. Damson pulp scorches readily once thickened, and a scorched batch tastes of it all winter.
- Sugar is not specified"Just enough to sweeten" is genuinely ambiguous. For a butter of this style, somewhere between a quarter and half the weight of the sieved pulp in sugar is a workable range; start at the low end and taste, since ripe damsons vary sharply in acidity.
- The wineMrs. Williston says only that the common wine of the country is thin and sour and much used in cookery; Heidelberg suggests a light dry local white. A few tablespoons stirred in at the end is the spirit of it, and by her own account it went in more to keep the sweetmeats than for the flavour.
- Knowing when it is doneDrop a spoonful on a cold plate. When no ring of watery juice weeps out at the edge and a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a clean track, it is ready.
- Do not seal with egg-white pastePaper pasted down with egg white was a nineteenth-century mould barrier, not a seal, and it depended on cool cellars and frequent inspection. Refrigerate the finished butter and use it within a few weeks, or process it by a current tested water-bath method.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of damsons gives something in the region of three half-pint jars, depending on how far the pulp is reduced.
Damsons take their name from Damascus, the fruit having long been traced to the eastern Mediterranean before spreading through Europe as a hardy, sharp-fleshed plum better suited to the pot than the hand. What Mrs. Williston describes from Heidelberg is essentially Pflaumenmus or Zwetschgenmus, the German plum butter cooked down for hours without added pectin and eaten on bread through the winter. Her aside about self-sealing cans is the most revealing line on the page: by the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, glass jars with rubber-ringed lids were ordinary equipment in American kitchens, and she is explaining to her correspondents at home why she still pastes her jars shut with egg white and paper like their grandmothers did. Community cookbooks of the period often carried contributions from members living abroad, and those entries tend to double as small reports on how other people keep house.