NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

September 24, 1998

Plains Folk: Plum Full

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1998 Plains Folk

The plums set so heavy this year that the branches are broken down. I'm talking about the native plums, Prunus americana, transplanted to our yard as suckers from nearby shelterbelts. Which raises the subject about what to do with all those plums.

Plums are a fruit of history and culture on the Great Plains. On the southern plains (north to Nebraska) you find Prunus angustifolia, what the biologists keep trying to call Chickasaw plum, but everybody else calls sandhill plum. This is the plum that the men of the Coronado expedition of 1541 ate and compared to the fruits of Castile, and the one for which the nooning site on the Santa Fe Trail, Plum Buttes, was named.

You find Prunus americana up and down the plains, including on heavier soils. It was known to my grandparents' generation as the shelterbelt plum, as they came to know it through the shelterbelt programs of the 1930s. Americana is still commonly distributed by public agencies for planting in plains states and is highly rated for wildlife value. Both the bush and the fruit of americana are a bit larger than those of angustifolia. The culinary merits of the two are similar, although the sandhill plum makes a brighter jelly.

Jelly has always been the most common use for wild plums on the plains, and they do make an admirable spread. Traditionally, too, the juice of the wild plums has been combined with that of other fruits lower in pectin, like chokecherries, to jell them.

All of which is great, but don't stop there, as wild plums make wonderful plum butter. I've written about making plum butter in a previous column, including the caution not to press the pulp too hard through the colander, lest the bitterness of the skin comes through. Wild plum butter goes great on a sturdy and nutty bread. I like to spread heavy wheat toast with butter and plum butter and then lay a piece of fried oatmeal sausage (that's another subject) right on top. Wild plum butter also makes a great filling for kolaches.

Here at the West Fargo Branch Station for Applied Alternative Horticulture, though, we've been working on what else to do with all this plum butter, and this summer has seen some breakthroughs, particularly in the area of the barbeque grill. Once again, here's the lab manual.

Experiment #1: plum butter and mustard sauce. Maybe you've made a honey-mustard sauce for pork. Do the same thing, only use plum butter instead of honey. Rub the chops with whatever seasonings you like—maybe include some sage—and use the plum butter and mustard sauce liberally. After the final application cover the grill, turn off the heat, and let the plum flavor steam into the chops.

Experiment #2: plum butter and chile sauce. You're on your own as to proportions here, but the point is to mix the plum butter with good red chile powder, and probably some garlic, either fresh or powder. Add just a little tomato sauce, and you've got a barbeque sauce like nobody else's, great on pork or chicken.

Our shortcut to a plum butter and chile barbeque sauce is to mix plum butter with Mama Lupe's chili con queso sauce out of the bottle. As I understand the story, this is the sauce developed at the La Siesta cafe in the Oakland district of Topeka. Mixed with sharp cheddar, it made the chile con queso for La Siesta "Home of the Chili con Queso," as they like to say. Then the recipe was franchised out to a company in Moundridge, Kan., which produces Mama Lupe's sauce. Unfortunately Mama Lupe's is not distributed on the northern plains, but we can hope.

Somebody try this and let me know how it comes out: cook some baby carrots, put some butter in with them, sprinkle with dried thyme (or maybe marjoram), and stir in some plum butter.

Any other ideas? We've got a lot left.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136