Home › Ices, Preserves, and Confections › Damson Cheese
Damson Cheese
(England.) Select sound, ripe plums. Put in a stone jar with 1/4 pound of sugar to each pound of fruit. Set the jar in boiling water, and cook until tender. Remove the stones, and cook longer, to a pulp. Add now 1/2 pound sugar to each pound of fruit, and cook slowly until thick and almost dry. Put into jars, seal, and keep in a cool place. Slice, to eat with toast or bread.
A fruit paste, not a dairy cheese — the name refers only to the firm, sliceable block the cooked damsons set into. The whole point is cooking it far past jam stage, until a spoon drawn through leaves a clean channel.
- Total sugarIf both additions are reckoned on the original fruit, they come to 3/4 lb sugar per pound, which suits a paste meant to keep; the recipe is ambiguous, since the second 1/2 lb "to each pound of fruit" may be meant for the stoned pulp. Weigh the fruit before you start and decide which reading you are following.
- The stone jar in boiling waterThis is a water bath, which keeps the fruit off direct heat; damsons scorch easily, and a stoneware jar also avoids metal in contact with very acid fruit. A heavy-bottomed pan on the lowest flame, or a bowl over simmering water, does the same job. Expect an hour or more of gentle cooking before the fruit collapses.
- Getting the stones outDamson stones cling. Cook the fruit soft first, as directed, then push the pulp through a colander or coarse sieve — the stones stay behind. Do not use a fine sieve at this stage or you lose the skins, which carry much of the flavour and colour.
- "Thick and almost dry"This is the hinge. The second stage needs constant attention and frequent stirring, and it will spit as it thickens. It is done when the paste pulls away from the sides of the pan in a mass and holds the mark of the spoon.
- Setting rather than sealingDamson cheese was commonly pressed into straight-sided pots or shallow moulds so it could be turned out whole and sliced. Line a small loaf tin or ramekins with cling film or oiled paper if you want that; the recipe's jars will work too, though a wide mouth makes turning the block out much easier.
- KeepingThe sugar concentration and low water content do the preserving. A cool, dark cupboard is the intended "cool place"; refrigerate once cut. Properly dried cheese improves over several months and firms further as it ages.
- ServingBeyond toast, it is the standard English partner to hard sheep's and cow's-milk cheeses, and to cold game and lamb.
"Cheese" in this sense is an old English usage for any thick preserve stiff enough to be turned out of its mould and cut, alongside the closely related damson and quince "butters" and "pastes" — the same vocabulary that gives Spanish membrillo its English name of quince cheese. The damson itself is a small, astringent, clingstone plum long associated with the north and west of England, where orchard hedges and mill towns supported a dessert trade in the fruit, and where tradition also holds that it fed a dyeing trade. Because damsons are too sharp and too full of stones to eat out of hand in quantity, cooking them down with sugar was the standard way to use a heavy crop, and the resulting block kept through winter without refrigeration. Its appearance here under "(England.)" reflects the book's premise of collecting national dishes from abroad: this is presented to American readers as a specifically English way with plums.