[Sca-cooks] Re: plums in plum pudding

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Adamantius commented:
>>Makes sense, but I wonder at what point "prune" came to mean "dried
>>plum", when it used to mean, to English-speakers, a variety of plum
>>that frequently comes to us imported in dried form.
>Huh? So what type of plum is this? Was this type (in dried form) the 
>only type of plum the English had access to?

No, but the dried ones they imported (lacking the kind of sunlight 
approach found in Italy, which also has the kind of plums called... 
dah daaaaahhhh... prunes), were presumably mostly prunes, hence the 
name. If you look at the label on a box of prunes in the supermarket, 
there's often a picture of the exact kind of plum used to make what 
we know as prunes: those little, blue prunes that appear to have 
originated in Italy. Sort of blue-black, small, with yellow flesh, 
maybe 1 1/2 to 2 inches across? This type of plum is known as a prune 
(sometimes called an Italian prune to distinguish between them and 
prunes, which, as everyone knows, are dried plums ;-)  ).

The English had access to other plums, and may well have begun to 
grow them, possibly after the Crusades. There are recipes for damsons 
(which come originally from the Middle East, I believe, as in 
Damascus, Syria) and bullace plums which call for straining their 
juice, so they may be presumed to be fresh. I don't know where they'd 
come from to be fresh, but probably from not very far off. France?

>>For that matter, is not the same true of raisins?
>Are you saying that when we see "raisin" in a period recipe that 
>this meant a specific type of grape which was dried, rather than any 
>dried grape?

Originally, yes. There seems to have been some eventual extension of 
the use of the term, but yes, raisins are a specific kind of grape. I 
forget if it's the variety itself, or a standard treatment of same, 
that makes them raisins, but technically, if you take a grape and 
sun-dry it, it's not, technically speaking, necessarily a raisin. The 
English were importing their raisins in dried form (sometimes known 
as raisins of the sun, to distinguish between fresh and dried, 
presumably), so most people would associate the term "raisin" with 
the little dried fruit.

Similarly, currants (the dried kind) are raisins of Corinth (dried 
grapes of a variety believed to come from Corinth), not actual red or 
black currants which come from Northern Europe and are berries (and, 
for all I know, are named for raisins of Corinth)

Adamantius