If you were at the Union Square Greenmarket last Saturday, and you decided that you might like to make some plum jam, and you headed over to the Locust Grove Farms stand only to discover that all of the damsons were gone, I hereby apologize to you for buying the last five pounds of damsons of the season. Or, rather, I don’t. It’s a patent untruth. I bought the last five pounds of damsons of the season and I’m glad.
I became an Anglophile at the tender age of three, when my parents let me watch reruns of The Avengers (even at such a young age, I knew that Mrs. Peel had the stuff, and one could do much worse than to grow up to be just like her). While I have mellowed a bit since my hardcore teenage Cool Britannia days, I still cling to the belief that there are some things the Brits have all over us on this side of the great divide. It makes perfect sense to me that there would be an organization dedicated to this magnificent fruit, and that there is a long beautiful tradition of damson use in everything from wine to cheese. My English cookbooks are filled with recipes for damson jam, damson jelly, damson butter, damson curd, damson ketchup, damson chutney, damson tart, damson cake, damson crumble. Every year I promise myself I’m going to try my hand at some of these lovelies, and every year I find myself making jam.
Like so many of my cooking adventures, I got the bright idea to try making jam from More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, who wrote beautifully about the “clean, forthright” taste of homemade plum jelly and raspberry jam, and whose forthright assessment of her math skills (I think the word she used was “decrepit") went a long way toward convincing me that maybe, just maybe, I could crack the code on jam. Ms. Colwin used Italian prune plums for her jam. I love Italian prune plums because they are the last remaining truly seasonal plum in wide distribution in New York City. For about two months in late summer and early fall, you can find these plums not just at the farmers’ markets, but at any corner greengrocer. Once the season is over, though, that’s it; no prune plums are coming from Chile. I have made jam from these plums, and while it was very nice jam, I admit that I prefer to use these plums in cakes and crumbles. I also admit that plum jam made from these plums is made much better with a slug of fine dark rum, but I know this is a controversial admission to make. 
Damsons, now, damsons need no assistance from rum. All damsons need is sugar, a little lemon juice, and themselves.
This was the advice I got when I made my first jam-making excursion to the stand where I buy all of my peaches and cherries in the summertime, all of my Concord grapes in the fall and all of my apples from October to March. Tumbled into a basket, nestled among the sugar plums and shiros and Elephant Hearts and greengages, were a mountain of small blue-black plums, labeled “very sour! perfect for jam!” These were damsons, I was informed by the farmer who grew them, and they were exactly what I was looking for. I took his word for it, since my only previous exposure to damsons were in a fancy coffee store in Pittsburgh that also sold interesting luxury foodstuffs, including a full line of Bonne Maman preserves. “Damson Plum Jam,” said the label, and I paid it no further mind, thinking it was some toffee-nosed affectation of a jam. It is embarrassing to think of how wrong-headed I have been about so many things in my life.
I had no idea how much to buy, so I settled on five pounds, figuring it to be a nice round number. It is indeed a nice round number, but it also makes for a time-consuming chore in pitting and cutting up the fruit. I have never learned to like this particular chore, the cutting up of five pounds of tiny, tiny fruit. My fingers become pruny and covered with brownish stains. My fingernails become as fragile as paper and look filthy for days, no matter how I scrub underneath them. I am not even halfway through the task before I become sick of the whole business and long to just throw everything away. But I don’t, just because I know that the resulting jam will be more than worth the effort, that the taste of this jam is a million-to-one return on the investment of time and labor I put into them. I have also learned that if I put Volume One of The Carl Stalling Project on the CD player, it will take me exactly the length of play to prep the fruit. It has now become a ritual, the exact way I want to pass the time, whistling along to “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals” and the incidental music from “The Daffy Doc” while I turn my fingernails to butter.
I flew by the seat of my pants the first time I made this jam. I was careful on all of the canning safety issues, sterilizing the jars and lids in a boiling-water canner, but as far as procedure went, I didn’t do any of the things I have since learned to do with other, more complex jams. I didn’t macerate the fruit in sugar before cooking it. I didn’t use a candy thermometer. I didn’t test for a set, i.e. I didn’t dip a cold spoon into the pot, raise it out of the steam and then pour the jam back into the pan and gauge whether it was forming a sheet. I didn’t act additional pectin, either commercial or homemade from apples or lemons, as plums have a high pectin content. I just read Ms. Colwin’s advice that this particular jam is done when it looks like jam, and then I went to work. With the stones removed, I had about 3 1/2 pounds of fruit. I added an equal amount of sugar. (Over the years, I have scaled back on the sugar, and now I use about 2 1/2 pounds of sugar for the same ratio. I think that reducing the sugar allows the flavor of the fruit to shine, but when you reduce the sugar, you can also affect the set of your preserves, and you also reduce its shelf life. The reason that preserve recipes in old cookbooks contain so much sugar is that the whole point of preserving was to put food by for the winter. If you want to keep your jams and jellies for at least a year, I would recommend using, at minimum, equal weights of cleaned fruit to sugar.)
Into the pan went the fruit and sugar, along with the juice of a lemon. On went the heat. I stood at the ready, wooden spoon in hand, and watched as the sugar began to melt and the plums began to yield and collapse in the syrupy, steamy heat. The skins began to give up their color; the dissolving fruit, which had begun to oxidize to a scary rusty brown color, suddenly turned a brilliant, just-shy-of-magenta shade of purple. The color was glorious, but the smell is even better. A damson cooking smells like a field of roses. I am not exaggerating, or trying to manipulate an image for poetry’s sake. There are few scents that affect me the way a pot of damson jam does. There is the scent of onions frying in butter or olive oil, the scent that fueled a thousand of my breakfasts at the Kiev restaurant on the Lower East Side. There is the scent of bread baking, the crust caramelizing, the yeast giving one more burst of activity. There are other, non-food-related fragrances, scents of a certain perfect eau de toilette, leather, sun-warmed skin, others that, in the interest of not giving too much information, I will keep to myself. If damson jam is not at the top of that list, it is very, very close.
If damson jam smells like heaven, it tastes even better. I have a real taste for foods that are bitingly sour in their natural states but cook into a tart smoothness: lemons, limes, crabapples, rhubarb. Damsons are not an eating-out-of-hand fruit; they need heat, sugar, a watchful eye and care. Apply all of this to them and you are rewarded with a jam that is sweet at first taste, followed by a pleasing puckery tartness, fruit acids and tannins all working their magic. “This is a winner,” my mom said the first time she tried it, and now she gets a jar every year, unless I’ve been particularly efficient and have bought more than a batch’s worth of jam, in which case she gets at least three.
Three years ago, I discovered something else to love about damsons: Assuming you don’t actually burn the syrup, it is not a dead loss if you overcook your jam, the way it would be with other fruit: instead, you will have damson butter, another very good thing. 2001 was one of those efficient years for me, where I caught the season early and bought 10 pounds of damsons at a time and turned them all into jam. One weekend, though, I overdid it, misjudged the thickness of the syrup, and cooked everything to a thick spread. The next weekend, I told Lucas, the guy at the Locust Grove stand who sells me the lion’s share of my fruit, about my adventure. He suggested that I bring some by, so that he and his fellow sellers could do some quality control. I promised I would, but three days after that, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, and I didn’t go downtown again for a month.
When I could finally bear to go downtown, I made straight for the market, the air still filled with the scent of ink, which I knew wasn’t really ink; it was the smell of collapsed buildings. I wondered if anyone would be at the market at all, but it appeared to be a normal market day. All of the regular Saturday farmers were there, and people were buying squash and sunflowers and microgreens and grapes. My nerves were still on a keenly wrought edge; I had no idea what would set me off and reduce me to tears, but I trusted that there would be comfort in routine, so I headed to the Locust Grove stand. All of the plums were gone. It was October, apple time. I held out the jar of damson butter to Lucas, apologizing for taking so long to get it to them. He acknowledged that we were living in a time where priorities would be rearranged for a while. We agreed that it was good to be back, and then I went to work, loading up on crabapples, dreaming of a winter full of crabapple jelly, paradise jelly (a mix of apple, quince and cranberry that is love in a jar), apple butter and dried apricot jam, to say nothing of a cabinet full of damson jam, pulling us through it all until the next season.