[Sca-cooks] Re: plums in plum pudding

[Huette von Ahrens]

Here is what the Oxford Companion to Food says in
part about plums and prunes:

PLUM, the fruit of Prunus domestica and other
Prunus ssp.  Other members of the genus include
the apricot, peach, sloe, and cherry.  The
relationship between plums and cherries is
particularly close, the distinction being mainly
one of size.

The word 'plum' has a long history of often
ill-defined use.  In the Middle Ages it seems to
have meant virtually any dried fruit, including
raisins, and this usage underlies names such as
'plum pudding' and 'plum cake'.  Francesca
Greenoak, in her highly readable chapter on the
plum family, discusses this point in relation to
Christmas (plum) pudding, and suggests that
raisins had already supplanted plums before 
Little Jack Horner (whose rhyme dates from the
16th Century) 'stuck in this thumb'; so that what
he pulled out was in fact a raisin.

Wild plums of several kinds are common throughout
the temperate parts of the northerhemisphere.  
The earliest cultivation of plums, which took
place in China, was of the species P. salicina,
usually called 'Japanese plum' because it first
came to the notice of western botanists in Japan.

It seems likely that P. domestica, the most
important source of modern commercial cultivars,
is indigenous to Central Europe; but the time and
manner of its origin are uncertain.  This plum
does not seem to have been noticed by classical
Greek authors, nor by Roman authors in the
centuries BC.  Pliny the Elder (1st century AD)
commented with surprise that the earlier writer
Cato (for example) had not mentioned plums and
explains that by his own time there was a 'vast
throng' of them; he enumerated a dozen distinct
types.  

Records survive which indicate that plums were
cultivated in the gardens of medieval monasteries
in England.  Chaucer refers to a garden with
'ploumes' and 'bulaces'.  The number of varieties
had increased considerably by the time of Gerard
(1633), who mentions having 'three score sorts in
my garden and all strange and rare'.  Two of his
main groups are the common damson and the
'Damascen Plum'.  His account shows that new
varieties were being imported from many European
countries.  Some of the best came from the 
Balkans and S. Europe; he praises those in 
Moravia in particular ...

PRUNE, the French word for plum, means in English
a dried plum.  The word has been used in English
in this sense since medieval times, although for
several centuries it could also, confusingly, 
mean a fresh plum.

Prunes all come from a group of oval,
black-skinned plums.  Their special
characteristics are a very high level of sugar,
which allows them to be sun dried without
fermenting (although nowadays the process is 
often speeded by drying machinery) and a 'free' 
or easily detached stone, which is uncommon among
plums.  Prunes turn completely black in drying as
a result of enzyme action.  This would be
considered unacceptable in any other fruit, but 
is deemed normal in prunes ...

The OCF goes on with comments about Prune d'Agen,
which is French, but does not talk about Italian
prunes whatsoever.

Huette


--- "Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius"
<adamantius at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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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=====
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they 
shall never cease to be amused.

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