RECIPE: DON'S PLUM SAUCE or WEDDING JAM

Last spring my mother sold her house in suburban Greenville, South Carolina, and moved out to the country. How country? There's a grizzled old plum in the yard, a wild blackberry patch out back and—Heaven's blessing—half a dozen persimmon trees in the thicket.

My first visit there was last Fourth of July, when Mom told she was getting married again. I already knew something was up, because she hadn't been calling as much as usual, and when she did, she would kind of quickly mention that she had been away for the weekend with "a friend." She didn't say Rhonda, or Jane or anyone else I know—and I know all of them. It was just "a friend." I'm old enough to catch the meaning of that kind of friend.

Turns out that the previous October Mom had reconnected with Don, a widower, at their 40^th high-school reunion, and they fell head over heels just like high-schoolers do. It was all pretty fast, my mom admitted, but she said she was old enough to know her own heart, and before the winter was out, she and "Donny" had decided that time was too short to postpone spending the rest of their lives together. Don, by the way, is terrific. I liked him literally from the first moment I saw him because my mother looked so happy and pretty standing next to him. Don brings out my mother's womanly side because he's so manly. Drives a Ford F 350 diesel pickup, hunts deer and wild turkey at his place in the South Carolina pine flats, owns a tractor. But he's also a gentleman to the core and just dotes on my mom. He won't let her cook dinner and even fixes her lunch to take to work every day. What more could a son ask for?

At any rate, that July 4th weekend the plum tree was pelting the ground with a literal windfall, and the blackberries were ripe to the point where you could tickle them off the vine. The backyard harvest became my wedding present.

I collected two gallons of blackberries for a jam to spread between the layers of their wedding cake. Then we picked about a half-bushel of plums that would, I thought, make for a nice cupboard of plum-cinnamon jam—a memento of my mom and Don's first summer together that would last through their first winter of marriage. I undercooked the first batch of fruit, though, and it didn't set, so the result was more of a thick sauce. That night I confessed to failure and served it over ice cream. Don went nuts. He loved it just as a it was—oozy—and jokingly claimed the sauce as his personal stash that we couldn't touch unless he was there to ration it out.

The next day, I cut up enough plums (pictured at the top right of the blog) to make six pints of DON'S PLUM SAUCE, which they served at the wedding with the cake and ice cream. The last few pounds of plums went into a second attempt at jam, which this time did thicken up after enough cooking, a useful demonstration of sustained heat’s effect on pectin, the naturally present carbohydrate that causes cooked fruit to set. Thus a cinnamon-plum preserve entered the Greenvalley repertoire as WEDDING JAM.

I wrote out the recipe for DON'S PLUM SAUCE OR WEDDING JAM last year for another use, and I didn't work out the ratios by weight. But it works fine as it is, I know, because I used it last week to cook up five pounds of Santa Rosa plums. Like MOM'S FAVORITE APRICOT BUTTER, this is a "family preserve," so the entire batch is for Don alone—and maybe for his wife, if he's willing to share.

DON’S PLUM SAUCE or WEDDING JAM

Plums are an exceptionally varied family of stone fruit and they recommend themselves to the home canner for a host of reasons. Meaty, inexpensive, mildly flavored and pleasant to work with, they also have an exceptionally long season thanks to the rolling harvest dates of the many varieties. Plums are also naturally rich in pectin, so they set up nicely if you want them to. As a final asset, plums’ unassertive flavor marries well with aromatics and other fruits alike. Note, however, that the varieties can’t really be used interchangeably. Purple-skinned damsons, tart and somewhat dry when raw, turn into a perfectly balanced plum butter when cooked with ginger, while the luscious Black Beauts and Elephant Hearts, perhaps the most delicious plums out of hand, becomes a sweet, unctuous, naturally vanilla-scented jam. I don't know what variety my mom's plum tree is, but Santa Rosas are close enough and they're what I'd recommend for this recipe.

The basic ratio of fruit to sugar below will yield either a sauce or a jam, depending on how long it’s cooked.

BASIC RATIO by volume

6:5

12 cups plums quartered and firmly packed, about 6 pounds

10 cups sugar

2 lemons

2 3-inch cinnamon sticks.

1 Pit and quarter the plums, then add lemon juice and cinnamon sticks and cover with sugar to macerate for an hour.

2 Put in a pot and heat to a full boil. Moderate heat, skim and keep boiling. Check for a loose set at about 10 minutes or a firm set at 15. Discard cinnamon, ladle into jars and seal. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

5 lbs plums yielded 4 pints

7 x 8 oz

2 x 4 oz