Sugar Plums a.k.a. Sticky Business

After picking the Golden Plums a few weeks ago, I made Ginger Plum Jam (which I previously posted here).

With so many perfect ones I wanted to somehow preserve them and happened upon a recipe for Sugar Plums.

This recipe hearkens back about 500 years, when one way to preserve fruit was with sugar... lots and lots of sugar. Lots of sugar.

This would have been very dear; sugar was a rarity then, and close to worth its weight in gold.

Nowadays, I find sugar in everything, and normally shop carefully, always reading the labels, to try and avoid at least some of it.

However, I wanted to see if I could have Sugar Plums dancing in my Christmas dreams so here's what I did..





SUGAR PLUMS

Using a heavy bottomed pot, I layered about 20 plum halves , cut side down.

The recipe said to "cover the layer in sugar", which I did.

Then the next cut-side-down layer, "cover in sugar", repeat, and again.

I had 5 layers, which amounted to over 80 halves, and 1/2 of my big bag of sugar!



Next step: turn the burner on low and very slowly heat the pot of plums and sugar and eventually bring to a slow boil, a.k.a. "walme".
I believe it's pronounced 'wawm'

Do not mix, move, or disturb the plums. The whole point is to infuse the sugar into the somewhat delicate plums and have them retain their shape.

After finally coming to a boil - this takes about an hour or more - boil only for a minute.



Well, that's hard to measure, as the boil starts very gently, and takes so long to go through the whole mix it's hard to determine when the boil started, and whether it's even 'boiling' or simmering, or really getting started...



















After the boil, very gently transfer to a wide dish; in this case, a 9" x 13" glass baking pan.

Let sit, undisturbed, for 3 days.

After 3 days, carefully return the sugar and plum mix back to the pot, and bring back to a very slow 1 minute boil.

Once again, this takes up to an hour.

After the boil, transfer back to the wide glass dish.

Repeat 3 times.

Yes, the recipe says 3 times. For a total of 9 days.

That means having this now thick, syrupy mix, full of glossy bits of fruit, attracting ants, for days at a time on the counter in the heat.

The recipe even addresses this, suggesting to put the dish into a water-filled pan which is bigger than the glass dish.

The water then is the moat over which the ants have trouble crossing.

Quite appropriate having a moat, considering how old the recipe is.

After the second or third boil, the fruit was the colour of deep russet or cabernet sauvignon, or darkest cherry wood and extremely beautiful.

And this is when the situation got sticky.


Next step:
Remove the plum pieces from the syrup. Hmm?

Using a slotted spoon to remove the pieces was pretty simple.

Putting them on the mesh rack was fairly straightforward. But it was my attempt at sorting and peeling each off the other where things got a bit sticky.

Trying to keep the plums from bunching up and drying into one sweet reddish gob gave me big fingers, as the syrup and the fruit bits stuck and made the job a little, um, sticky.

Finally, they were sorted and spread, on one wire rack, and allowed to drain and, hopefully, dry.



2 weeks later
Still, the fruit was 'wet'. Mostly, very sticky and covered with the now cooled syrup, and even more fragile. Heavy sigh.

The recipe says to coat the pieces in sugar(!) and transfer to a container for keeping, where they would keep for a year or more. I guess so!
I filled a bowl with more sugar.

Peeling them off the wire rack was another exercise, again singling out the small halves, now breaking or stretching into long sticky stretches of fruit.

Coating in sugar made them no less sticky.
They soaked up the sugar and still remained wet, so I filled another bowl, this time with powdered sugar (or castor sugar), and tried that type.
Still no difference.

Once again, big fingers. I pushed on.

Between peeling with my fingers and scraping with a food scraper, the plums were finally peeled, separated, coated, and layered into separated tiers in a container.

I hesitate to put a photo of them up here.

They're no longer gold, nor red.

They are now a muddy brown, all rolled into little lumps. I've never licked so much sugar from my hands, making myself sick. The leftover syrup has the tartness of the plum skins and is used for pancake syrup for something less sweet.

My final comments on Sugar Plums?
Never, never attempt to do this unless you have someone looking over your shoulder who has the experience and more positive results!
I shall update around Christmas to see if there is some kind of magical change in the Sugar Plums. Perhaps the Sugar Plum Fairy will wave her magic wand and make them all... well, prettier or lovelier in some way.
And maybe she'll make all that fuss and muss go away.
Sandra