The Gastrographer
Mapping Culinary History
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Journey Point Map Key
Plum
Prunus domestica (European plum); Prunus salicina (Japanese plum); Prunus mume (ume, Chinese plum); Prunus cerasifera (cherry plum)
🌍Origin
South Caucasus and Caspian basin (European plum, Prunus domestica, and cherry plum, Prunus cerasifera); the Yangtze basin of China (ume, Prunus mume, and Japanese plum, Prunus salicina) — c. 2000 BCE (European plum, South Caucasus); ume cultivated in China by c. 1500 BCE
🌱Domestication
The plum is not one fruit but four, domesticated independently at the two opposite ends of the temperate Old World, and the word 'plum' conceals this multiplicity in a single deceptively simple syllable. The genus Prunus, which also gives the world the cherry, the peach, the apricot, and the almond, scattered its plum-bearing species across Eurasia, and human beings took up at least four of them. The European plum, Prunus domestica, is the great plum of the West, and it is a botanical curiosity: a hexaploid carrying six sets of chromosomes, almost certainly the offspring of a natural cross between the diploid cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera) and the tetraploid blackthorn or sloe (Prunus spinosa). This hybridisation is thought to have occurred in the South Caucasus and the lands south of the Caspian Sea, where the wild ranges of both parents overlap, and where the resulting fertile hexaploid was taken into cultivation perhaps four thousand years ago. From this single species descend an astonishing range of cultivated forms: the prune plums or pruneaux that dry without fermenting around the stone; the damsons (subspecies insititia), small, tart, and intensely flavoured; the green-gold gages, of which the greengage is the most celebrated; the golden mirabelles of Lorraine; and the blue-black quetsches and zwetschgen of Central Europe. The cherry plum, Prunus cerasifera, is the smaller, tarter cousin, native to the same Caucasian and Central Asian arc, and it is the sour plum of the Georgian and Persian kitchen: gathered green and unripe, it is the soul of sauces and stews rather than a fruit for the hand. At the far eastern edge of the genus's range, in the warm, wet basin of the Yangtze, the Chinese domesticated two more. Prunus mume, called mei in Chinese and ume in Japanese and usually rendered into English as the apricot-plum or Japanese apricot, is botanically nearer the apricot but culturally and culinarily a plum; it has been cultivated in China for well over three thousand years, grown as much for its blossom as for its hard, sour, golden fruit, which is never eaten fresh but salted, smoked, or steeped. Prunus salicina, the Japanese plum, despite its English name also originated in China; carried first to Japan and then, in the nineteenth century, to California, it became the large, juicy, round dessert plum that dominates the world's fresh-fruit trade today. Four species, two cradles, and a single English word: the plum is, more than almost any other fruit, a lesson in how geography hides inside a name.
⛵Global Voyage
The plum travelled in two great streams that did not meet until the nineteenth century, when they finally converged in California. The western stream began in the Caucasus. The cherry plum and the early European plum spread south and west into the kitchens of antiquity: into Georgia, where the green sour plum became tkemali; into Persia, where the sour plum, the alu, became the defining note of the meat stew; and to Damascus, whose orchards gave their name to the damson, the 'plum of Damascus', that Roman soldiers and merchants carried back across the Mediterranean. Rome received the plum enthusiastically. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, marvelled at the 'great crowd of plums' (ingens turba prunorum) already in cultivation, and the prune entered Roman cookery as a sweet-sour foil to pork and game, a pairing recorded in the recipes attributed to Apicius. From Rome the European plum spread northward into Frankish and Germanic Europe, where it found its true heartland. Across a broad belt running from Lorraine and the Rhine through Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and down into Serbia and the Balkans, the plum became the most important orchard fruit of the common people: dried for winter, boiled down to the dark, sugarless butter the Germans call Pflaumenmus and the Slavs povidl or pekmez, distilled into slivovitz and pálinka, and folded into dumplings, cakes, and preserves. Serbia and its neighbours remain, to this day, amongst the greatest plum-growing nations on earth. A separate Crusader-era branch carried a particular prune plum from Syria to the monks of Gascony, founding the prune d'Agen; another carried the cherry plum and the dried alu eastward along the Silk Road to Bukhara, whose name still rides on the 'alu Bukhara' of the Afghan, Pakistani, and North Indian kitchen. The Arab Mediterranean carried the prune westward to Morocco, where it sweetened the lamb tagine, and the gages and damsons crossed the Channel to England, where Sir Thomas Gage gave his name to the greengage around 1724. The eastern stream began in the Yangtze. The ume spread from China to Korea, where it became maesil, and to Nara Japan around the eighth century, carried with Buddhism; there, salted and sun-dried, it became umeboshi, the sour, scarlet pickle at the heart of the Japanese table, and, steeped in spirit and sugar, the liqueur umeshu. The Chinese themselves smoked and preserved the sour plum into wumei and brewed it into suanmeitang, the dark, cooling sour-plum drink of the imperial summer. The Japanese plum, Prunus salicina, completed the circle: carried from China to Japan over centuries, it was imported into California by the plant breeder Luther Burbank in 1885, whose Santa Rosa and dozens of sister cultivars made the United States, and then the Southern Hemisphere, the modern centre of fresh-plum growing. When the French prune d'Agen reached the same Californian valleys in 1856 in the baggage of Louis Pellier, the western and eastern streams of the plum's four-thousand-year journey at last ran together in a single orchard country.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
The plum is one of the most widely cultivated stone fruits on earth, and its production divides neatly along the ancient lines of its domestication. China is by a wide margin the world's largest producer, growing both the fresh Japanese plum (Prunus salicina) and the ume (Prunus mume) in enormous quantity. After China come Romania, Serbia, and the other plum nations of Central Europe and the Balkans, where the European plum (Prunus domestica) remains the orchard fruit of national identity: Serbia treats the plum (šljiva) as a near-sacred fruit, the basis of its national spirit, slivovitz, and the centrepiece of its preserves and dumplings. The United States, chiefly California, grows the fresh dessert plum and the great bulk of the world's dried prunes, the latter descended directly from the prune d'Agen of France. Culinarily the plum keeps its four identities distinct. The European plum is the baking and preserving fruit of the West: the zwetschgenkuchen of Germany, the plum tart of Alsace, the dumplings of Hungary and Bohemia, the powidl and pekmez of the whole Central European belt, the damson cheese and greengage of England, and the prune that sweetens the tagines of Morocco and the stews of Persia and Ashkenazi Europe. The cherry plum, gathered green, remains the sour heart of Georgian tkemali and the Caucasian and Persian sauce tradition. The ume is never eaten as a fresh fruit at all: across China, Japan, and Korea it is salted into umeboshi, steeped into umeshu and maesil syrup, and brewed into suanmeitang, valued as much for digestion and preservation as for flavour. And the Japanese plum is the round, sweet, juicy fruit of the modern supermarket, eaten fresh out of hand across both hemispheres. Few fruits carry so many separate culinary lives under one name, and fewer still bridge, as the plum does, the cuisines of Tbilisi and Tokyo, of Belgrade and Beijing.