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Complex Numbers #1034573 added July 2, 2022 at 12:01am
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Damson In Distress
Really short today. It's just one of those days. But there's still something interesting I want to share.
Well, this is a thing local to me that I'd never heard of, so of course I had to check it out.
“I’ve looked in all my cookbooks for a caramel pie which my husband tells me is made with damson preserves. There just ‘ain’t no sech animal.’ Please see what you and your readers can do to solve this marital difficulty.” The letter was signed “CPJ, Richmond.”
And I'd never even heard of damson.
Given the Virginia angle, at first I thought that it was truly something hyperlocal. But no, it turns out (spoiler alert for the article) that the damson (which might not be really a plum) came from Europe and possibly West Asia.
Today, however, most people in the United States, and even Virginia, would be hard pressed to even tell you what a damson is, much less offer a recipe for its signature jam pie.
Yep.
There’s a reason that most recipes involve cooking or pickling the fruit. A raw damson, with its inky hue and silvery bloom, is less luscious than its looks might suggest: Bite into one and you’ll get a sour, astringent mouthful. Cooked gently with a quantity of sugar, however, the fruit’s flavor unfolds into something deeper and more beguiling.
Not meaning to be rude, but with enough sugar, almost anything becomes edible. Maybe even eggplant (I haven't tried).
In some European countries, damsons have remained an essential ingredient of spirits (such as Czech slivovice) and jams; in the U.S., not so much.
I've heard of slivovice (which I thought was spelled slivovitz, but whatevs), but never had any, and didn't know what it was made of.
Anyway, the whole thing is fascinating as a bit of culinary history, but this part struck me the most:
Gothie explains that because the fruits are so small, growing on brittle stems, they are hard to harvest mechanically and “not too great for commercial production.” In the early part of the 20th century, other fruits became cheaper to grow on a large scale, and fresh fruits could be imported out of season. Preserving fruit for one’s pantry was no longer a necessity, and damson caramel pie was, at its heart, a country pie born of that need.
Because it made me wonder what else we might have lost because it wasn't suited for mass production and mechanization.
I mean, that hardly stops a lot of harvesting. Coffee, for example, was always labor-intensive; fortunately for Western coffee drinkers, it mostly grows where labor is basically free  (and from what I understand now there's more mechanization).
Daniel Perry, proprietor of Jam According to Daniel in Charlottesville, Virginia, says that a taste of his damson preserves seems to trigger “a really Proustian thing … I get many great stories from customers about their memories.”
I probably should get out more. That's in my town and this is the first I'm hearing of it, as well. In my defense, it doesn't involve beer.
But like I said, not feeling any kind of in-depth analysis tonight. Still, I was hoping someone else might find this whole thing interesting. |
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