Max Miller Prepares Victorian Sugar Plums While Explaining There Are No Plums in the Recipe

Max Miller of Tasting History prepared Victorian sugar plums, a candied confection that does not contain any plums whatsoever. He faithfully followed directions from a 1865 recipe, although he decided to use modern machinery rather than the traditional baking implements. The process was a bit onerous, taking Miller the whole weekend to prepare.

Around Christmas time you hear a lot about  sugar plums, visions of sugar plums dancing in children’s heads, the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker. But what exactly is a sugar plum? Because they don’t have anything to do with plums. So to answer the question what are sugar plums I’ve decided to spend an entire weekend making a Victorian recipe for cherry sugar plums.

As with previous videos, Miller explained the history behind sugar plums, particularly how they got named.

In Medieval France they were called dragie or confit. Dragie, later dragée, would come to refer mostly to nuts coated with sugar. Think Jordan almonds. While the spices were called confit or comfit in English. …At the time the term plum could refer to many things other than just an actual plum. It could refer to any small piece of dried fruit like raisins, or zante currants, both being the plums added to plum pudding, and the term could also refer to just anything that was good or kind of rich…What is clear is that soon after the word sugar plum started being used to refer to these comfits.

Miller explained that it was a good experience but not worth so much time. He suggested some modern alternatives that are similar to sugar plums instead.

Anyway, delicious. Are they worth the work? Hehe. No they are not. Go get yourself some Jordan almonds, go get yourself some of these pine nut covered things. What’s cool is these are actually made pretty much the same way that they were in this cookbook, because the only ingredients are sugar, pine nuts, and gum arabic. So made the same way which is pretty cool.