The Twelve Historical Fruit Recipes of Christmas
Tra la laaaa la la laaaa la, tra la la la la laaaa! It’s Christmas time, and here’s a selection of fruity dishes from the archives for your holiday dinner table.
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Fruit Harvest Highlights – Summer 2025 Edition
2025 has been an incredible year for all types of fruit. Here’s part one of my harvest highlights.
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John Farley’s 1783 Recipe for ‘Prune Pudding’
Here’s a typically gnomic C18th recipe for a boiled plum pudding, which I’m sure would be very tasty, if you can get it to work…
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Orchard Visit: Killruddery House and Gardens, Bray, Co. Wicklow
A productive kitchen garden with mature and recently-planted fruit trees makes this Bray estate well worth visiting.
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Orchard Visit: Airfield Estate, Dundrum, Dublin
This 38-acre working farm and education centre offers a great many mature trees, vines and more for the fruit enthusiast to enjoy.
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Orchard Visit: Powerscourt Estate, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow
A visit to this grand old estate garden resulted in an unexpected bonus: a row of handsomely mature, wall-grown fruit trees.
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Essential Orchard Work for Early Summer
Summer can seem like a quiet, peaceful time in the orchard, but there are still plenty of important jobs to be getting on with.
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My Fruit Harvest Highlights – 2023 Edition
It’s my 2023 fruit growing round-up! The highs and the lows, the good and the bad, the weird and the wonderful.
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Charlotte Mason, on Making ‘An Excellent Plumb Pudding’
Here’s a late C18th recipe for what amounts to a slightly less rich and spicy version of a modern-day Christmas Pud.
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Harvest 2022 – Top Fruit from the Allotment Orchard
Here are the extended highlights of this year’s harvest of apples, pears, quinces, plums and damsons. Top fruit galore!
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Robert May’s 1665 Recipe for ‘Preserving Green Fruits’
Here’s a quick seventeenth century guide to preserving green or under-ripe fruit: gooseberries, plums, pippins, peaches and grapes.
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More Fruit Stories from Atlas Obscura
Here’s another selection of fruit-related stories from the Atlas Obscura archives.
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Orchard Visit: Two at Phillips Park, Prestwich
A winter walk leads to the discovery of not one but two new orchards, one on the site of a former kitchen garden.
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Plot #79 Orchard Year in Review, 2021 Edition
We’ve had a mixed year on our allotment plot orchard. Here’s a round-up of the good, the bad and the downright ugly.
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Mary Smith, on Drying ‘Green Gage Plumbs’
This eighteenth century method for drying greengages calls for candying your plum(b)s in syrup before setting them to dry.
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Elizabeth Moxon’s 1764 Recipe for ‘Plumb Porridge’
This eighteenth century version of porridge definitely isn’t the porridge we know and love today, plumb or otherwise.
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Now Collecting Historical Orchard Recipes
I’ve started putting together an index page of the archive recipes that I’m posting on the site.
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Au Revoir to Pear, Plum and Damson Blossom?
Two nights of bad weather after early blossom has bloomed is bad news, but hopefully not the end of this year’s crop.
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A Lady’s 1701 Recipe for ‘Paste of Plumbs’
The anonymous author of this 18th century tract takes time our from moralising to make something jammy.
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Gallery: Top-Fruit Blossom, Spring 2020
2020 has been a rather excellent year for fruit blossom. Here’s a gallery of some examples I’ve seen in various places.
