Plums, Damsons, and the Art of the Difficult Fruit

There is a tree at the bottom of a garden I know, and for most of the year nobody pays it the slightest attention. It is not a handsome tree. It has a slightly put-upon look, a tendency to drop twigs, and leaves that go an unremarkable yellow before falling off in a sulk. And then, for about three weeks in the early autumn, it does something that makes the entire household lose its mind: it produces, from nowhere, several hundred weight of small, dusty, blue-black plums, far more than any sane family could eat, all of them ripening at once, most of them landing on the lawn with a soft and reproachful thud before anyone can get to them.

This is the fundamental plum and damson problem, and it is worth stating plainly, because the whole culture of the plum flows from it. The plum does not arrive politely, a few at a time, over a civilised season. It arrives all at once, in a glut, in a panic, in quantities that turn a mild domestic fruit tree into a logistical emergency. One week there is nothing. The next week there is a wasp-besieged carpet of fallen fruit and a kitchen full of bowls and a dawning, slightly hysterical realisation that something must be done with all of it, immediately, before it rots.

Which is why plums, more than almost any other fruit, have generated across Europe a vast and ingenious body of techniques for the urgent conversion of too-much-fruit-right-now into something that will keep. The plum is the mother of invention. Specifically, it is the mother of about four hundred cakes, a great deal of jam, and several of the more alarming spirits in the European cupboard.

First, though, a small act of untangling, because “plum” is a word doing an enormous amount of work.

The plum family is sprawling and confusing and full of members that barely seem related. At one end you have the big, round, juicy dessert plums — the Victorias, the Santa Rosas, the ones you eat out of hand, sweet and dripping. At the other end you have the damson: small, oval, blue-black, with a dusty bloom and a flavour that, eaten raw, makes you wonder what you have done to deserve it. The damson is to the plum roughly what the quince is to the apple — a tart, astringent, uncompromising relative that gives almost nothing raw and everything when cooked. Between these poles sit the greengages (small, green, intensely honeyed, the connoisseur’s plum), the mirabelles (tiny, round, golden, the glory of Lorraine), the bullaces, the sloes, and a whole confusing middle ground of things that are sort of plums and sort of not.

What unites them — the whole difficult tribe — is that cultures all across Europe looked at this annual avalanche of stone fruit and worked out, independently and brilliantly, how to catch it.

The Germans and the Central Europeans may have taken the plum most seriously of anyone, and they built their response around one particular variety: the Zwetschge, the Italian plum, the small oval purple plum that is firm, not too juicy, easily halved, and comes cleanly away from its stone. That last quality matters more than it sounds. A freestone plum that halves neatly is a plum you can lay out in rows, and laying it out in rows is the foundation of the single greatest plum creation in Europe: the Zwetschgenkuchen, or Zwetschgendatschi as they call it in Bavaria, where they are especially passionate and especially regional about it.

This is a thing of real beauty. A yeasted or shortcrust base, and then the halved plums laid across it in close-packed, overlapping rows, cut-side up, like roof tiles, so that as they bake they collapse and caramelise and weep their dark juice into the dough beneath. A little sugar, sometimes cinnamon, sometimes a drift of almonds or streusel on top, and — crucially — a blob of unsweetened whipped cream alongside, to cut the sweet-sharp intensity of the fruit. In the plum regions of Germany and Austria this cake is early autumn; it appears in every bakery and on every family table the moment the Zwetschgen come in, and vanishes again when they go. The city of Augsburg is so attached to its Datschi that it has styled itself, with civic pride and no apparent irony, the Datschi capital, and there are festivals and records and an enormous amount of regional opinion about exactly how it should be made.

And when the Central Europeans have finished baking, they turn to boiling, and here we meet one of the great preserves of the continent: povidla, or powidła in Polish, Powidl in Austrian German — a thick, dark, intense plum butter cooked for hours and hours, with no added sugar at all in the traditional versions, until the fruit’s own sweetness concentrates into something almost black, spreadable, and keeping. It is the filling in the dumplings, the swirl in the pastries, the thing on the bread in winter. Making it is traditionally an all-day, whole-family, stir-the-vast-pot-in-shifts affair — exactly the same communal-preservation ritual I have watched play out over tomatoes and over mushrooms and over grape must, the same autumn instinct to turn the glut into the keeping-store against the cold, performed this time over a cauldron of slowly blackening plums.

The French, naturally, have their own plum, and it is the one I would steal first if I could only take one home. The mirabelle — tiny, round, golden, sweet, with a flavour that manages to be both honeyed and faintly almond-scented — belongs almost entirely to Lorraine, in the east of France, which grows the overwhelming majority of the world’s mirabelles and guards the fact fiercely. For a few weeks in late summer and early autumn they are everywhere in the region: eaten fresh, baked into the classic tarte aux mirabelles, boiled into jam, and — because this is France, and because there are always more than can be eaten — distilled into eau-de-vie de mirabelle, a clear, fierce, perfumed plum brandy that tastes of the fruit the way a memory tastes of a day.

That distilling instinct runs right across the plum world, and it produces some of the most characterful spirits in Europe. In the Balkans and Central Europe the plum becomes slivovitz — šljivovica, slivovice, pálinka in its plum form — the plum brandy that is practically a load-bearing element of social life across Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, the Czech lands, Hungary, and beyond. It is the thing poured for a guest, for a toast, for a funeral, for a birth, for no reason at all. It is homemade in vast informal quantities in the plum-growing countryside, where a good tree is an asset and a still is a reasonable thing for a family to own. The same glut that gives Germany its cake gives the Balkans its national spirit: two completely different cultural monuments built from the identical problem of a tree dropping more fruit than anyone can eat.

The British, true to form, took the most difficult plum of all — the damson, the sour little blue-black one nobody can eat raw — and did something quietly wonderful with it, which is to make damson cheese. Not cheese at all, of course, in the same way that quince “cheese” is not cheese: it is the damson equivalent of membrillo, the fruit cooked down with sugar into a dense, dark, sliceable paste, set firm in a mould, and served — in the old country-house tradition — with cold meats, with game, or with a hard cheese, cut into little slabs. The damson’s ferocious tartness, useless raw, becomes in this form a deep, winey, almost spiced richness that cuts through fat better than almost anything. There is damson jam, too, and damson gin (the damson’s answer to sloe gin — the fruit steeped with sugar in spirit until it bleeds its colour and character out into the bottle), and in the damson-growing valleys of the English north-west, a genuine local pride in a fruit that most of the country has forgotten exists.

The damson’s near-cousin, the sloe — the tiny, vicious fruit of the blackthorn, so astringent it is essentially inedible in every form until you get sugar and gin involved — produces the same story at an even greater extreme: a fruit good for almost nothing except being transformed, picked after the first frost from the hedgerows, and turned patiently into the ruby-red sloe gin that is a fixture of the British winter. It is the hedgerow’s final offering of the year, and it asks, like the quince, like the damson, like all these difficult fruits, to be worked for.

I keep coming back to that put-upon tree at the bottom of the garden, and to what it represents. There is a whole category of fruit — the plum and the damson, the sloe and the quince, the bullace and the gage — that does not do the easy, generous, eat-me-now thing of the summer fruits. These are the awkward fruits, the ones that arrive too fast and too sour and too many, that demand effort and ingenuity and a hot stove and often a quantity of sugar and sometimes a still. And the extraordinary thing is that human beings, faced with these difficult, unpromising, overwhelming trees, did not give up on them. They did the opposite. They invented, out of sheer stubborn refusal to waste, some of the best things we eat and drink — the Datschi and the povidla, the mirabelle tart and the slivovitz, the damson cheese and the sloe gin. The difficult fruit turns out to be the generous one, in the end. It just makes you earn it first.

The tree will do it again next year, of course. It will produce nothing for eleven months and then, in a single reckless fortnight, drop a small fortune of blue-black plums onto the lawn, far too many, all at once, impossible to ignore. And once again the bowls will come out, and the big pot will go on, and somebody will stand over it stirring, turning this year’s glut into next winter’s store — doing the oldest and most sensible thing there is to do with a tree that gives you more than you can eat.

Which is, when you think about it, simply to say thank you, and get cooking.