THERE is something rather bewildering about plums,’ writes Christopher Stocks in the excellent Forgotten Fruits. Although, initially, I wasn’t exactly sure why. They don’t stink of death and fetid drains, like the durian. Nor, unlike the kiwano melon, do they have the texture of cucumber and taste of banana. There’s certainly nothing perplexing about their flavour, which moves from the mouth-puckeringly sour to the lusciously and lasciviously sweet. Nor their colour, deep black to virgin white, with every shade in between. No, as Mr Stocks explains, it’s simply a matter of nomenclature. ‘Apples are always called apples, although they come in many different forms. A plum, by contrast, can certainly be a plum, but it can also be a damson, a bullace, a greengage or a Mirabelle.’ Their ancestry may be ‘complex’, their history ‘convoluted’, but the ‘real nightmare lies in the names of this fruit’.
He’s not wrong. Plums have been cultivated for more than 2,000 years in Europe and Asia and probably came to Britain with the Romans —although possibly before, as plum stones have been discovered during the archaeological excavation of Maiden Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in Dorset. The best known are Prunus domestica, or the large ‘European’ plum, which are the blessed hybrids of the sloe (P. spinosa, not considered a plum) and the cherry plum (P. cerasifera). That first union happened naturally, somewhere around the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, in the Russian republic of Adygea.
There is not only the ‘Victoria’ plum, but the small and super-sour bullace; the ‘Mirabelle’, mostly used for jams and brandy; and the damson, which comes from Damascus and arrived in Europe with the Crusaders. The greengage, with its heaven-scented flesh, is another member of the same family and a plum that connoisseurs rate as best of them all.
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