What do Sugar Plums have to do with plums? The answer is: not as much as you might think, although modern recipes do include the plums used for prunes as an ingredient. I personally was relieved to learn that the “visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads” in Clement Moore’s classic The Night Before Christmas (1823) did not have anything to do with handfuls of smushy fruit.
Instead, sugar plums historically were purely sugar-based spiced candies belonging to the same category as gum drops and peppermints. Originally, they had a hard sugar coating that was wrapped around a nut, or even small seeds like caraway, anise, or cardamon. (Imagine the taste sensation of chewing through a sugar coating to find a tangy cardamon seed in your mouth!) You can get an idea of their original crunch if you think of old-fashioned jellybeans, M&Ms, Jordon Almonds, or coated mints once common at weddings.
Sugar plums may have started as a medicine in ancient Arab pharmacies. The term sugar plum goes back at least to 1600, though, with a different meaning. To speak with a mouth full of sugar plums, according the 1600 Oxford English Dictionary, meant to speak words of deceit. To stuff someone’s mouth with sugar plums implied some kind of bribe or device to keep that person silent. To take the matter one step further, “to sugar plum” by the 18th century—the phrase functioning as a verb—meant to pet, fawn over, or make up to.
But a lovelier meaning of this candy overtook its less attractive etymological history. Candy historian Laura Mason describes the sugar plums that emerge in the 17th century as:
oval or spherical hard-sugared sweets, bought from shops in paper cones, and colored red with mulberry juice or cochineal, blue with indigo, green with spinach, and yellow with saffron.
The earliest surviving recipe comes from 1609 written by Sir Hugh Plat who tells us that “a quarter of a pound of coriander seeds, and three pounds of sugar will make great, huge and big comfets.”
Sugar plums clearly were for the rich. A “head full of sugar plums” long stayed a metaphor for wealth and privilege. Sugar plums stretched across the Atlantic and became popular in the United States in the early 19th century. You might encounter them in literature under the commonly used names of confits or dragees.
It isn’t easy to make a sugar plum. The skill and patience needed were considerable in the days before blenders and online suppliers for coarsely ground sugar. Until modern times, ordinary people could see a sweet treat like a sugar plum only at Christmas. Small wonder that the mention of a sugar plum would evoke rapture in a child’s eyes, or would lead the beloved poet Eugene Field (Wynbken, Blynken, and Nod) to make them a centerpiece of his candy-studded Sugar-Plum Tree which, in its second stanza, points out that:
When you’ve got to the tree, you would have a hard time
To capture the fruit which I sing;
The tree is so tall that no person could climb
To the boughs where the sugar-plums swing!
But up in that tree sits a chocolate cat,
And a gingerbread dog prowls below –
And this is the way you contrive to get at
Those sugar-plums tempting you so:
It is also no wonder that a character by the name of the Sugar-Plum Fairy would evoke magic just by mention of her name. She was born in E.T. A. Hoffmann’s now classic story The Nutcracker (Der Nussknacker, 1816). Lovers of Tchaikovsky’s ballet may not realize that the story at its core reflects a wave of Gothic German Romanticism that Hoffmann helped to foster. If you rethink the ballet with that fact in mind, it’s easy to feel the underlying eeriness of the plot. (Seriously, would a child falling asleep under the Christmas tree want it to grow into a menacing tower and find herself in a faraway world she cannot control?)
Of course, Tchaikovsky softened the story and added so much stunning orchestral color and lyrical beauty, it’s hard even to think of the original plot. For the iconic “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” he introduced one of the loveliest, newest special effects available: the recently developed (1886) keyed percussion instrument called the celeste. Back when purity of sound was savored by listeners (i.e. before amplified sound), the celestial tones of the celeste literally wowed the audience. The instrument (in a famous story) was even kept by Tchaikovsky under wraps to make sure his colleagues Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov would not steal the idea before the ballet’s December 1892 premiere. By the way, the celeste managed to become even more iconic when chosen for the magical “Hedwig’s Theme” in the first Harry Potter film.
But I digress again: back to sugar plums we eat, not the ones that twirl around.
The making of sugar plums did get cheaper after certain modern processes were developed by confectioners. But recipes easily found now are quite different from the original delicacy, and involve creating a coarse-sugar coating around a small ball made up of ground dried fruits (including prunes), nuts, and spices. The key to success seems to be the consistency and thickness of the coarsely ground sugar into which the balls are repeatedly pressed, even across several days.
Here are a couple of these sugar-plum recipes, although you will have no trouble finding dozens. Some of them are offered by people who do not seem to like the candy, but perhaps that is because these treats are not the real sugar plums. To me, though, they all look delicious.
For fun, this first recipe from the Food Network offers a short campy video (for adults, although not inappropriate) with a pinkish-purple fairy and tongue-in-check dialogue undergirded by Tchaikovsky’s music for celeste. It made me laugh but might confuse a starry-eyed pre-school dancer. The information, and recipe provided, though, are serious.
Here is another charmingly worded recipe that I believe the author does enjoy. And there are many others. I haven’t found a recipe that harkens back (see, we can restore that term) to the 17th-century concept, but perhaps you will find one. If so, please do send it to me. And if you make it successfully, definitely let me know: we have a post reserved for you in our 2022 Advent Calendar.
