A Banner Year for Beach Plums

After years of stopping at Briar Lane on the side of the road in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and stocking up on Marjorie Wiles Sayre’s homemade jellies and preserves—treats for the winter, gifts for friends and co-workers—it was time, finally, to try our hand at making beach plum jelly. Because this summer, the sulky Prunus maritima blossomed like some 17 year locust of the plant kingdom: beach plums were everywhere. I’d always been on the lookout for them, during bike rides along the back roads of Truro and Wellfleet and while walking through the scrubby meadows leading up to the dunes. And once in a while I would spot a plant bearing a fruit or two, though usually there was already someone else there, squatting alongside with a pail.

Not this year. This year was an efflorescence of beach plums. Plums along the walk to Brush Hollow. Plums along the roads. Plums in people’s yards. They were sweet, too, when fully ripened, purple and yielding to the touch, and with their thick skins reminiscent of wild grapes except spicier, with a complex sweet-tartness. And a rather large pit.

The beach plum is about the size of a cherry, a close relative in the large Prunus family, and it grows along the eastern seaboard from New England to Virginia. Giovanni da Varrazano made the first European observation of the beach plum. Records of settlers harvesting the beach plum go back to the early 1600s. But though efforts have been made over the years to cultivate it—in the 1930s, Ocean Spray, a name synonymous with another fruit associated with New England, the cranberry, actually had a beach plum product on the market—the beach plum resists. Here’s a perfect explanation, quoted in Waverly Root’s Food:

Beach-plum jelly brings handsome prices, but it is almost always scarce because the recalcitrant bushes have baffled all efforts to grow them commercially. Cultivation seems to offend them. When planted in rich, well-fertilized soil, they grow tall but produce hardly any fruit. Even when planted in the poor sandy soil that they seem to prefer, they sulk in captivity. Apparently they need the stress and adversity that is inseparable from life at the shore.

We picked sandwich bags full of plums and decided to follow the simplest of jelly recipes in Elizabeth Post Mirel’s Plum Crazy, a wonderfully single-minded book. She called for no added pectin if the plums came from dry sandy soil, as ours did, and if the fruits were—as ours were—of varying degrees of ripeness. Alas, the jelly never jelled, leaving us with an overly sweet beach plum syrup. On the other hand, we did make a shrub, which is a very old-fashioned fruit and vinegar beverage. More on that later.