Texas Red Plum Pie

The color is as psychedelic as Prickly Pear juice! (Is Texas a naturally psychedelic place? Perhaps! Psilocybin mushrooms DO grow here naturally.)

I bought a few pounds of red plums last year, and what I didn’t eat, I made into PLUM JAM. It is the B*E*S*T Jam I have ever made, and not only that, IT JELLED the very first time (I think because the plums are rather small and tart.)

So, this year, I bought a few pounds at the Farmers Market, and I have been eating them; but I have enough jam from last summer to do me just fine for this summer. And then, they started to get a little ripe. Okay, a few were getting OVER RIPE! What to do?

I thought, do people make Plum Pie? It doesn’t sound familiar. So I looked it up on the innertubes, and I saw that “Rustic Plum Tart” is super popular. I thought about making a couple of them (I needed to make my neighbor Jeannie a pie, too), but, I have MADE these “Rustic Tarts” before (I made a Rustic Apple Tart once, out of the Hudson’s on the Bend cookbook), and I found that I missed the crumb topping that I usually use on fruit pies.

So, I decided to make PIE, not a TART, and to use a crumb topping. For the filling, I decided to use unpeeled plums (the Rustic Tart recipes didn’t peel) and I thought it sounded nice to use lemon zest and almond extract and brown sugar. And lemon juice.

The pies turned out SPECTACULARLY. So well, that Dave said it is his new favorite kind of pie. I wonder why Plum Pie isn’t as well known as Cherry Pie? Because it is just as red and vibrant as cherry.

MADE UP PLUM PIE

Enough red plums to make a pie

3/4 cup light brown sugar

a lemon

a teaspoon of almond extract

1/4 cup cornstarch

PASTRY

1 1/2 cups flour

2  sticks butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

I suddenly realize I haven’t ever blogged my SPECIFIC instructions for PIE CRUST. OY!! I don’t want to get into the specifics NOW! It will take a million years! I am just going to assume you know how to make a pie crust.

1. Using one cup a flour, 1/4 t of salt, and 3/4 a stick of butter, MAKE A PIECRUST.

2. Slice the red plums off of the pits, using a little paring knife, into a bowl.

3. In another bowl, whisk together the brown sugar, cornstarch, and almond extract, in that order.

4. Pour the brown sugar mixture over the plums, and toss around with a rubber spatula.

5. Dump fruit into pie crust. The fruit should be sort of shallow, not deep-dish, about an inch and a half to two inches deep.

6. Zest the lemon over the plums in the pie pan.

7. Cut the lemon in half, and squeeze the juice of half the lemon over the plums. Put the other half off the lemon into your ice tea, or vodka and tonic. Or beer. Or water!

8. Put the remaining flour, white sugar, and quarter teaspoon of salt into the food processor. Pulse. Add the stick of butter, sliced, and pulse until it is crumbs.

9. Arrange crumbs on top of fruit, and bake entire pie in a 350˚ oven until the crust is visibly browning and the plum juice is visibly bubbling at the rim. About 40-50 minutes.

It rained THREE INCHES yesterday (a little bit of Alex) and then probably ANOTHER inch TODAY! For Texas, this is like a month's worth in two days.It was so wet and humid out, my camera fogged up just from going outside. That is why it looks like a picture of the Olden Days.

Red Plum Jam

6 pints of Plum Jam

It hadn’t been my intention to make red plum jam this year; I still have 3000 pints of blackberry “jelly” (it didn’t jell very well!) and many half-pints of peach butter, spiced and plain (which I adore the most of all my jams and jellies), and pints of apple butter, and I even have several half-pints of strawberry/cranberry jelly. Oh, and I have fig preserves. In short, I have enough Jam and jelly to last the rest of my life, because I think making preserves is interesting and fun, but I don’t use them up at a great rate.

But Virginia asked me to pick up some red plums for her at the farmer’s market, and I did; THEN, I had misgivings and thought I had not bought enough (the plums were very small, and the farmer, Lightsey’s Orchards of Mexia, thought I had ought to have bought half a bushel, and not just 5 pounds. Because they were mostly all pit!)

So I was going to return the five pounds and get a half-bushel, but the five pounds were really overripe and had practically disintegrated in the bag! From banging against each other, I suppose. They were NOT RETURNABLE!

So I made plum jam out of them. And here is the preposterous, the amazing, the ridiculous thing: THEY JELLED RIGHT AWAY, THE VERY FIRST BOIL!!!

That never happens, at least not for me! I have been unlucky in most of my jam-making. Usually I can only count on it working out if it is a fruit butter situation: it cooks until it gets thick. Sometimes I can get a jell when I add extra pectin, you know, after I realize that it is NEVER GOING TO JELL!! But not always.

This time, I just removed the pits from the Plum Mush, and sliced up a few underripes. I dumped it into my copper jam pot, and then realized I had forgotten to measure it. So I estimated the amount of Plum Mush to be 6 cups. I added 6 cups of sugar, boiled it, and it JELLED!

Plus, it is the best jam I have ever made! It is way better than blackberry jelly, I even like it better than strawberry jam. It has a nice tart bite.

Here is the Victorian-era recipe:

PLUM JAM

Sterilize some canning jars in a hot water bath, (half-pints are best), and have some brand-new canning lids handy, and the requisite number of bands. I never know how many, it is best to do MORE than you think!

Cut or mash the flesh from some red plums. Remove the pits; leave the skin on though.

Measure pulp into a large cooking vessel that is not cast iron.

Add an equal amount of white sugar. Don’t try to make it healthier by using less! EQUAL AMOUNTS!

Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally and making sure you do not scorch it. After a while, it gets foamy, and them the foaminess subsides. After the foaminess subsides check it to see if it is jelling once in a while (or obsessively) whatever works for you! (I alternated between casual and obsessive.) When it is jelling, it kind of coats the stirring spoon in a more noticeable way, and when you pour the liquid off the side of the spoon, the drops run together a bit, or (if you are lucky) get “stringy”. (Then you know for sure it is jelling!)

Ladle into jars and hot-water process for ten minutes.  Put on lids and bands and allow to cool. When they are cooling, they seal and make a little “click” sound!