Turns out, they aren't plums at all, but rather a confection made from dried fruits and roasted nuts and/or spices combined with citrus peel and honey, formed into balls and rolled in powdered sugar. The word 'plum' was used in times past to describe several different round, sweet fruits or confections rather than the specific type of fruit we use the term for today. I decided to try making some with a Sugar plum recipe I found at Saveur to experience the real thing first hand. Here are the results:
What I learned:
- I chopped everything by hand, and my results would have probably been improved by more patience and better knife skills (or a food processor). Some of the nuts were just too coarsely chopped to stick together well, and I ended up with about 3 plums worth of loose, spiced and slightly fruit-flavored nuts, which certainly weren't inedible as is, but they weren't sugar plums...
- Sugar plums are not the prettiest confections, as you can see from the photos. It was quite hard to make them stick together, and even with the ingredients more finely chopped, I imagine they'd still be rather lumpy and odd looking.
- They're quite tasty, the spices gave them a bit more of an exotic taste than I was expecting from an old fashioned English recipe, and I liked the citrus flavor from the orange peel.
- They are pretty sweet. I think maybe rolling them in cocoa would be an interesting substitute for the powdered sugar. Probably not true to period, but it might make for a kind of Fruit & Nut chocolate bar combination of flavours.
- I also found another recipe from Alton Brown on the Food Network site that I might try out. It has an even more intriguing mix of spices...
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