The Baltimore Urban Forager

Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, “What a good boy am I!”

Put this English nursery rhyme into a search engine and all you’ll get are a lot of hazy stories alluding to Thomas Horner, the lowly steward to the last abbot of Glastonbury who supposedly plucked the deed to a fancy manor house in Somerset out from a pie. (Why it was hidden in a pie and how plums came to stand in for ripped-off real estate is an especially murky part of the tale, though allegedly it’s a play on “plumb,” meaning lead, and referred to the lead mines purported to be on the estate.)

For urban foragers in Baltimore, the story on plums is much more straightforward. They’re available for the picking in mid-June from plum trees mostly on residential streets, such as in Roland Park and Guilford.

The plum trees in Baltimore are under-canopy trees, with dark burgundy-colored leaves that, in contrast to the green leaves of most other trees, appear decorative rather than productive.

Being nearly as burgundy as their leaves also makes the plums hard to notice. A neighbor who planted two plum trees along the sidewalk of his home never knew they bore fruit at all. That is until I told him I had already harvested all half a dozen worth.

In fact, plum trees have been notably unproductive in Baltimore lately, only bearing a few fruit per tree this summer. I was only able to “pull out” enough to make a pint-size jar of brandied plums. Their scarcity, however, will make them all the more prized with my family over the holidays. “What a good girl am I!”

The French are famous for their plum tarts; sugarplum fairies even dance in the dream sequence of the Nutcracker Suite. Nonetheless sometimes you’ll find a call for prunes in European-style meat dishes, especially with pork or in the famous Chicken Marbella recipe from the Silver Palate cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins.  Since Lukins passed away in August 2009, several articles in the New York Times have been written about the significance of this book, and this recipe in particular (unusually combining plums, olives, and capers), in transforming American cuisine since the late 1970s.

But, for the most part, plums fall on the sweet rather than the savory side of European and American recipes; the Little Jack Horner rhyme got that one right. By contrast, the East Asian transformations of this humble fruit are more in the savory, sour, and salty range. Westerners tend to consume plums raw, baked in tarts, or fermented in a fruit wine, but rarely cook, can or pickle them. Besides prunes, for instance, it’s rare to find any other form of processed plums in our grocery stores.

Nothing could be further from the case in East Asian cuisine where plums have been transformed into a much wider realm of culinary possibilities. Umeboshi salted pickled plum, is a classic staple in Japanese cuisine.

Try it with raw tuna, shiso (perilla, sometimes known as purple mint, Japanese basil, or wild coleus), and a touch of lemon in a makizushi roll. You won’t be disappointed. The salty sour liquid produced from the process of making umeboshi is called umezu “plum vinegar” (not technically a vinegar) and used in cooking. Umeshu is a delicious plum wine that comes in many varieties in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan.

Chinese also snack all year ‘round on dozens of varieties of pickled, dried, salty, sweet, and sour plums. They are sold in portable bags in China as commonly as bags of chips are sold here. They go well with tea in the summer or with sour plum juice (suanmei tang), one of the rare examples of a traditional Chinese drink served cold. Plum sauce is also a classic dipping sauce for egg rolls, spring rolls and roasted duck. The list goes on.

Plumbing the virtual archive on East Asian recipes will give you a sense of what all the fuss is about regarding plums in East Asia where Prunus mume originated. The species seen around Baltimore, however, is known as the Purple-leaved cherry-plum tree (Prunus cerasifera “Nigra”).

Here is my general brandied fruit recipe, taken from my mother’s copy of the Sunset Book’s Home Canning: Preserving, Freezing, Drying (1975). This is a classic worth combing for in used bookstores or Baltimore’s unique the Book Thing.

Brandied Plums
1 ¼ cups sugar
1 cup water
6-9 pds firm fruit
1 ¼-1 ½ cup brandy

For syrup, combine the sugar and water in a saucepan, bring to a boil, and cook until the sugar dissolves; keep hot. The recipe then calls for cutting in half and de-pitting the plums, but the ones I collected were so small, I skipped this step. Clean and drain fruit and pack into hot jars. Add 3-4 Tbsp brandy per jar depending on how much of a liqueur flavor you want and fill the rest with syrup to within ½ inch of the top. Put jars in boiling water and process for 20 minutes to ensure sterilization. Makes 6 pints. I naturally adapted this recipe for my single-pint plum brandy experiment.