[Sca-cooks] Re: plums in plum pudding
Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius at verizon.net
Thu Dec 25 07:09:04 PST 2003
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
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