Plums

Plums are the fruits of some species in Prunus subg. Prunus. Dried plums are often called prunes, though in the United States they may be labeled as 'dried plums', especially during the 21st century.

Plums

Quotes

• The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast,
  Or being early pluck’d, is sour to taste.
  • William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593), l. 527

• Like a green plum that hangs upon a tree,
  And falls, through wind, before the fall should be.
  • William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), X, l. 5

• CARDINAL: What, art thou lame?
  SIMPCOX: Ay, God Almighty help me!
  SUFFOLK: How cam’st thou so?
  SIMPCOX: A fall off of a tree.
  WIFE: A plum-tree, master.
  GLOUCESTER: How long hast thou been blind?
  SIMPCOX: O, born so, master.
  GLOUCESTER: What, and wouldst climb a tree?
  SIMPCOX: But that in all my life, when I was a youth.
  WIFE: Too true; and bought his climbing very dear.
  GLOUCESTER: Mass, thou lov’dst plums well, that wouldst venture so.
  SIMPCOX: Alas, good master, my wife desired some damsons,
  And made me climb, with danger of my life.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, act 2, sc. 1

• Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune.
  • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929), pt. 1

Damsons

• Many old writers mention the great and famous city of Damascus. Now in the territory of the Damascenes there is a very large quantity of the so‑called cuckoo-apples, cultivated with great skill. Hence this fruit gets the special name of "damson," excelling the same kind grown in other countries.
  • Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 2, 49e
  • These, then, are plums, mentioned, among others, by Hipponax (Bergk, P.L.G., frag. 81):

    They wore a chaplet of plums and mint.

  • Alexis (Theodor Kock, C.A.F., II, 397):

    A. Now look you! I've seen a vision, I think, which portends victory. — B. Tell it. — A. Attention, then. In the stadium methought one of the contestants, stripped for the fray, came up and crowned me with a circling chaplet of plums. — B. Great Heracles! — A. Ripe, they were.

  • And again (ibid., 398):

    Have you ever seen a sweetbread nicely broiled, or a baked stuffed spleen, or a basket of ripe plums? That is how his face looks.

  • Nicander (Schneider, frag. 87):

    The apple which they call the cuckoo's.

  • But Clearchus the Peripatetic says (F.H.G., II, 327) that the Rhodians and the Sicilian Greeks call plums sloes, as does also the Syracusan Theocritus (VII, 146):

    Young trees weighted to the ground with sloes.

  • And again (XII, 3):

    As much as an apple is sweeter than a sloe.

  • But this fruit, though smaller round than a plum, is the same in taste, but slightly more acrid. Seleucus in his Dialect Lexicon says that êla, cuckoo-apples, and madrya are the same kind of plum. Madrya is for malodrya ("apple-fruit"); brabyla are so called because, being laxative, they "eject the food"; and êla is for mêla ("apples"), according to Demetrius Ixion in his Etymology. But Theophrastus says (Historia Plantarum, III, 6, 4): coccymêlea ('plum-tree') and spodias ('bullace') — the latter is a kind of wild plum-tree; while Araros (Kock, II, 219. See Pollux, I, 232) calls both the plum-tree and its fruit coccymêlon. Diphilus of Siphnos says that these are fairly juicy, perishable, easily excreted, but of little value as food.

External links

• The Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, 7 vols. (Loeb Classical Library, 1927–1941)