Visions of Sugar Plums: Exploring A Christmas Meme

This post was updated on December 8, 2022.

Down below we have included a recipe for Sugar Plums. If you’d like to get right to it, just click the button.

Traditions and Memes

If you compare notes with your friends, you’ll probably discover that the holiday traditions your family practiced while you were growing up, and that you continue as an adult, differ in some ways that defy explanation. 

Maybe your family opened gifts on Christmas Eve and then slept in on December 25.  Perhaps you had to wait at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning while your parents arranged things around the tree. 

But regardless of those details, if you grew up in the Western Hemisphere, your holidays were surely influenced by a meme: sugar plums.  

You’re familiar with memes – those silly images or videos that get passed around the internet.  But I’m thinking of them in a different context.

And while we assume that sugar plums are real things, how many of us have actually seen, let alone tasted, one?  Are they really real?

For this week’s post, I’m going to provide some proof.  Not about Santa Claus, Virginia.  Just about sugar plums.

A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane – Remembering Our Origin Story

We launched The Cook and The Writer in August, 2018.  It was the result of a brief discussion that Mary and I had one day.  Something like this:

(For now, we’ll set aside the obvious naivete of my question or my complete inability to grasp the scope of a complex topic. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve asked that question, and I’m sorry to say that the lessons I’ve learned have never stuck with me.)

Almost as quickly as we made the decision to start the blog, we selected Mimi Sheraton’s book “1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die” as our Guidebook. This was a far better decision, because it gave us a source of ideas that led us to try some things we might never had tried, like Hakka salt-baked chicken and rose petal jelly. It also gave us extra inspiration to seek out new foods and experiences while traveling. During a trip to Italy and Sicily in 2019, we tore a section out of the book and took it with us to help us focus on the unique foods in the area.

Stalking the Wild Sugar Plum

Earlier this year, after we arrived in Portugal, we looked through the Guidebook to see what Mimi had to say about Portuguese food.  It was a short section – only three Portuguese dishes were mentioned – and they were combined with some others under the heading  “Spanish and Portuguese”.  That’s a combination that some of our new neighbors might take issue with.  Wars have been fought, etc. 

One of the dishes that Mimi highlighted was sugar plums.  I made a note – “write about this in December” – and here we are. When you start asking “what are sugar plums?”, you find some interesting, and contradictory answers.  Here’s what I learned.

Sugar Plums – History and Mythology

Those familiar lines from Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, a.k.a. “The Night Before Christmas” are almost obligatory in any discussion of sugar plums.  Let’s face it – they represent one of only two reference points most of us have.  The other is the Sugar Plum Fairy in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.  

Sometimes they really are plums

The greengage plum is grown across western Europe and is known by several names, including Reine Claude in France, in honor of Queen Claude (1499-1524).  In Portugal they are similarly known as Raínha Cláudia.  

In the 16th or 17th century, Dominican nuns in the town of Elvas created a delicacy using Raínha Cláudia plums. They boiled them in a sugary syrup, then preserved them whole in the syrup or dried them and coated them with sugar. The sugared plums were served with another local dessert, called sericaia, made with eggs, sugar, milk, cinnamon, and flour.

Plums soaked in sugar sounds like what something called a “sugar plum” might be.  Unfortunately, greengages are not in season now, so I couldn’t find any in the local stores.

Zingerman’s, the Michigan deli and food store, sells candied greengage plums from Portugal that have been soaked in sugar syrup for six weeks, then dried in the sun. They’re pricey – $40 USD for 9 plums – but they’re also out of stock right now.

Two Alternative Views

I found two other explanations for “what is a sugar plum?”.  

Let’s start with Mimi Sheraton’s description:

In an aside, Mimi also mentioned that in England, sugarplums are also known as comfits, which are made from fruits, nuts, or seeds coated and preserved with sugar.

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Fun fact:  You probably think you’ve never heard of comfits before, but you simply forgot.  In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice has a box of comfits in her pocket, which she hands out as prizes after the Caucus Race. (That’s where the participants ran in patterns of any shape, starting and leaving off whenever they liked, so that everyone wins.)

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I found a more scholarly point of view from Samira Kawash, a Ph. D. and professor emerita at Rutgers University.  She is the author of Candy; A Century of Panic and Pleasure and founder of the website Candy Professor. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Professor Kawash provided a contrasting opinion:

She also gave a more detailed explanation of comfit, describing it as “a sweet made of sugar hardened around a central seed or kernel in successive layers.”  Some modern day examples of comfit are jawbreakers, jelly beans and M&Ms. 

So Who’s Right?

I’m always fascinated when I research a topic like this and find multiple stories that contain similarities and contradictions.  But since I’m not a historian, I’ll leave the task of reconciling the differences to others.  What I wanted was to taste a sugar plum. 

Since I couldn’t buy one locally, I decided to make some.  The recipe I found seemed to respect both of the histories – it included fruit, nuts, and spices – and it was simple enough that even a writer could follow it.  (Though I had some careful supervision by our resident cook!)

Here’s the recipe.

The Sweet Conclusion

These are very sweet, but the flavors – fruit, nuts, spices, even the orange from the zest – all come through. And they’re great with coffee!

Now that you know about the history of sugar plums and have a recipe to make them, I hope you can make your own “visions of sugar plums” become a reality.

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I’ll end on a serious note today. Much of what we write here is about food. But there are millions of people in the world who face severe hunger or starvation. Please take a moment to read our other new post, A Serious Note (updated for 2022), and join us in taking small steps toward eliminating hunger around the world.

Thanks for reading and taking action / Obrigado por ler e agir

Mike

The Writer

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