The glut of Cherry Plums (Prunus cerasifera) this year is astounding. In fact most of the wild fruit coming out, or just about to, reminds me yet again, that Nature is truly abundant. A simple observation of my local environment makes this self evident.
One thing I have learnt from foraging wild food, is that Nature continually gives, and gives. Of course dry periods exist, but on the whole over a year, there is an abundance of food to be had from the hedgerow larder.
This observation allows me to relax into my life. It takes the concern that sometimes crops up over not having enough money or stuff etc. This is a 180 degree flip from how I used to live my life before foraging. Before I lived a fear-based life, bashing my head out over making money, needing status symbols, needing some fixed point on so-called security. Instead, when I walked away from my old life, I went into Nature and Nature healed me. For a second time… Phew, it was a close one!
In modern times we have a fear of Nature, a reticence to trust her and a desperate need to control and commodify the landbase. And we wonder why we have brought our own existence to the edge of a cliff. But the solution, as I see it, is to go back into Nature, to observe, and with what we learn create a better world, one that works with Nature, rather than against her. In mutual co-existence instead of dominance.
And now after all that pondering, it is time to give you my Cherry Plum Jam Recipe… Enjoy.
Ingredients
- 4 LB Cherry Plums
- 4 LB brown cane sugar
- 1/2 pint of water
Suggested Instructions
- Put all the ingredients in a large flat-bottomed pan.
- Stir and bring to the boil. Boil until the skins start coming off and the fruit comes away from the stones.
- At this point, pour the Cherry Plum jam mixture into a large piece of muslin and squeeze out fruit pulp and back in to the pan.
- Continue boiling the jam mixture until ‘setting point’ is reached. Which can take as long as 30 minutes.
- Setting Point: Put a couple of saucers into a fridge to chill. It is best to do this a bit before you start making the Cherry Plum jam. Using a teaspoon, let a few drops of the jam mixture drip on to a chilled saucer and allow it to cool for a short while. Now push your finger sideways against the jam. When it is at the right setting point, the jam should crinkle, and be nice and tacky.
- Pour into sterilised jam jars and screw the lid on.
Quantity: 7 jars
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
nice with a bit of fresh ginger put in while you are boiling it, too!
Do you let the mixture cool a bit before you squeeze through the muslin? Isn’t it a bit hot!
Would it be possible to pre cook the fruit without the sugar first to get rid of the stones and the skins?
I have just picked a couple of pounds of yellow cherry plums and am looking at different ways of preserving them.
Have just spent 3 days picking cherry plums, made lovely wine and have now, 40 jars of jam and chillie plum sauce. An idea is to put in a peice of finely grated ginger and cardonom seed pods into jam mix before cooking and remove at end of jam making before bottling. Found a good way to remove seed was to force through fine wire mesh(flour sive) with wooden spoon less wastage this way.
A shame though as there is so much more on tree’s,have no more bottles make more .
Hi Cathrine
Yes I always precook plums just enough to sofen them and then destone them ether by hand to enable me to have a thicker jam or by way of forcing through floor seive I then weigh out the plum sauce and add sugar add my cardenom and ginger and cook to jam point
I’ve made jam with both red cherry plums and yellow cherry plums and both are fantastic. I used half the amount of sugar though and strained the semi cooked fruit through a sieve rather than muslin adn got a richer thicker runnier jam which is great for putting on top of ice cream, porridge, toast etc.
I made some of this last year thansk to the abundance of the fruit on the trees, I just boiled up the fruit with a little water added the sugar and squished the lot with a spud masher. When I was done i simply passed it all through a sieve with the back of a wooden spoon, leaving a lovely lovely jam and no stones, Is simples.
I have an abundance of dark fruit on a rather large Prunus cerasifera in my garden here in Belfast. It’s the first time, in 14 years, that I have noticed any fruit on the tree. It also seems to be a good year for other fruit in the garden (apples, pears & sweet cherries) apart from my Victoria Plum which seems to have lots of leaves but very little fruit, this year.
I would like to try this “Cherry Plum” jam. Can anyone advise me when I should harvest the Cherry plums from my Prunus cerasifera? They are currently (20 June) dark red and hard.
Thanks for any advise.
Pete
Irish Pete – Harvest them when they are soft and ripe and ready to eat off the tree. Assuming you have ID’d the correct tree!
We gather these in June the years these wild beauties produce in our arid Texas area. I wash and stem them, then place them in an electric roaster with water to cover and cook them on the front porch until soft (about 2 hours for a full roaster). When the fruit is cool, I take hand fulls and place in a collander, mashing the fruit around and around to extract the pulp into a bowl. (Seeds and most of the peel are discarded.) I then use the pulp to make jam using the directions on any box of pectin. Friends request these, and the half pints make great Christmas gifts with a fresh loaf of bread.
A little chilli and red wine in the process does wonders to the flavor, and a sprinkle of salt helps to release and emalgamate them.
Ive made 9 different types of plum jam from our wild cherry plum tree, used hundreds of plums, and i havent even put a dent in the amount the tree produces. If someone could kindly jump the fence and take all you can carry, that would be rather apreciated.
Warren Farrow: –
Hello Warren, How did you make your chilli plum sauce?
Would be grateful for a receipe.
Many Thanks
Jade
I COOKED THE PLUMS WITH 5 CUPS OF WATER, SO I HAVE LOTS OF JUICE. CAN I MIX THE JUICE AND PULP TO MAKE THE JAM?
DOT
Hi, I slice the sides off half (ish) of the fruit, like doing a mango and put all the scraps in with the other half. boil up the scraps half, use an electric whisk to break them up then put the mess through a colander. Beware it will splatter, but it takes the hard work out of removing the stones!
Reduce juice down BEFORE adding the sugar to avoid it sticking/caremelising. When it has reduced add the other fruit and the sugar before boiling until setting point.
this gives a jam with bits rather than a jelly.
just taken a bit of everyones advise and made a mountain of jam from our bumper crop.
have wanted to do this for years but are normally away on summer vacation at this time, and fruit goes to the birds and the elements.
thanks to our current flood crisis i am home with nothing to do.
am thinking of making cherry plum wine with the other half tonne of excess cherry plums . ha ha ha
many thanks john
With a lot of experimentation over the last two days after discovering a cherry plum tree in our backyard with 16 kg of almost-ripe, firm cherry plums (great win!) we found the easiest way to get the stones out was to put 1kg batches of them into the microwave to steam them for 6 minutes, then leaving them to cool. Squeezing them gently removed the stones, while keeping all the juice and flesh. This allowed us to get through the 16kg of cherry plums for 50 375ml jars of amazingly delicious jam in 5 hours.
I just found a cherry plum tree whilst camping in the Norfolk Broads. I thought they were cherries at first and was confused about the taste as I’d never heard of cherry plums before. I grabbed a load before we left, and I’ve just made my first jam…. I don’t know how it will turn out! I de-stoned them by hand and used caster sugar as I hear plums are high in pectin so don’t need to use jam sugar, is this right?