Truffle Times
by: Janie Master
October 2007

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"Plums Galore"

Fall is the season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness” as John Keats wrote in 1820. He ended his ode ‘to autumn’ with; “And still more later flowers for the bees until they think warm days will never cease” which basically fulfills the Global warming syndrome of plenty more 90-degree days here in Colorado!

Our plums are, therefore, ripe. We have a very small tree, not unlike Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. Most of its branches are dead and fallen. Its center is rotting with age and its leaves are curled and dried out but oh, the cascades of fruit that cover the remaining branches! The prune plums are bunched together like giant grapes and the arms of the branches themselves cannot support the weight of them and have bent to the ground like an old woman carrying too many groceries.

We cannot give enough away so I decided to make jam to sweeten the cold winter months to come. I picked about 20 pounds of them one hot Sunday morning. Mel was in some godforsaken place selling wine again so I basked in my wine widow-hood and did what women have done for centuries at this time of year – I made jam.

Unfortunately, I haven’t all the perquisites of jam-making at my disposal not having made jam since the wonderful batches of apricot preserves I used to make every year in France. Yes, I had a good sturdy-bottomed casserole and the chubby mason jars all sterilized in boiling water warming in the oven. I put on a Pavarotti CD of his most famous arias and started to stem and stone the plums in the warm sunshine. After about 5 minutes I changed the CD to one by Charles Trenet singing French favorites as my tears were hampering the work at hand. How we’ll miss those Pavarotti high-Cs!

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