Damson Pie
Pies may be made of damson or other varieties of plums by following the method given for cherry pie. The sugar must be proportioned to suit the acidity of damson or plums used. All fruit pies are improved by a little pinch of salt in the fruit.
A cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: the book assumes you have just read its cherry pie and expects you to substitute the fruit and adjust the sugar. That adjustment is the whole instruction, and damsons need more of it than almost any other pie fruit.
- How sour a damson isDamsons are markedly more acidic and more tannic than sweet cherries, and the skins carry much of that astringency. Whatever sugar the cherry pie calls for, damsons will want appreciably more; taste after the sugar has stood on the cut fruit for a few minutes and adjust.
- Stoning themDamson stones cling hard and do not come away like a freestone plum. The usual approach is to halve the fruit around the seam, twist, and dig the stone out with a thumb or a small knife, or to cook the fruit briefly and skim the stones as they float free. Skins are left on.
- ThickeningDamsons throw more juice than cherries as they break down, so allow for a little extra of whatever thickener the cherry recipe uses, or the filling will run when cut.
- The pinch of saltThe advice in the last line is sound and worth following literally: about 1/8 teaspoon into the fruit. It sharpens the fruit flavour and keeps a heavily sugared filling from tasting flat.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; follow the cherry pie's. If you are working from a modern oven, a two-crust fruit pie of this kind is usually started hot to set the bottom crust, then dropped to a moderate heat until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Vent and protectDamson juice is dark and stains. Cut generous vents, set the pie on a sheet pan, and shield the rim with foil if it colours before the filling bubbles.
- YieldScaled to a standard 9-inch pie this gives six to eight servings, and about 1 1/2 lb of damsons before stoning; the recipe itself specifies neither.
The damson is a small, oval, blue-black plum, and the name is generally traced to prunum damascenum, the plum of Damascus. It has long been grown in Britain and in the eastern United States as a hedgerow and dooryard tree, and being too sharp for most tastes eaten raw it went chiefly into preserves, cheeses, jams and pies. The brevity of the entry follows the habit of many American cookbooks of the period, which treated pie as a method: one worked example, then a paragraph of substitutions for whatever the season produced. The instruction to proportion the sugar to the acidity of the fruit, rather than fix it by measure, reflects a kitchen where fruit varied from tree to tree and the cook was expected to judge it.