{"id":89258,"date":"2015-08-27T12:15:46","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89258"},"modified":"2015-08-27T12:37:50","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T16:37:50","slug":"of-plums-and-iceboxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/27\/of-plums-and-iceboxes\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Plums and Iceboxes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Passmore_Wickson-plum-1896\"<\/a>

A watercolor of the Wickson plum by Deborah Griscom Passmore, 1896<\/p><\/div>\n

Because my neighbors were out of town, I had been offered the gift of their weekly fruit and vegetable share from Community Share Agriculture. And because they are a family of four, when I came home from the nearby church where the produce is distributed, it was with bags heavy laden with corn, summer squash, celery, peppers, and stone fruits. It was more than I could eat.<\/p>\n

The soft little sugarplums were especially ripe\u2014several had burst in one of my totes on the way home\u2014and clearly needed to be dealt with quickly. In that moment, I realized that I had no idea whether one can refrigerate a ripe plum. I knew, of course, that it had to ripen\u00a0<\/em>at room temperature\u2014but what about afterward? Did it go horrible and mealy, like a tomato? Or was it stable and delicious, like a grape? It wasn\u2019t that I\u2019d grown up without fruit\u2014in season, there was always a large bowl in the kitchen. But we ate them all so greedily and quickly that the refrigeration issue (at least in my memory) never came up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then, of course, I thought of William Carlos Williams. Obviously, he\u2014or his wife\u2014believed in refrigerating plums<\/a>. But presumably a 1934 icebox wasn\u2019t as glacial as a modern fridge. And in any case, does Williams ever say, explicitly, that the plums were whole? Maybe they\u2019d been sliced and cooked, thereby stabilizing their sugars? People were awfully into prepared fruits in the first half of the twentieth century.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Poetry has helped me in many ways over the years: providing solace and comfort in hard times, and food for thought always. It has challenged me and confused me and gladdened me. But I rarely turn to it for practical kitchen\u00a0advice\u2014at least, not since reading about Edward Abbey\u2019s \u201cpinto bean sludge\u201d in the confusingly named (but fantastic)\u00a0John Keats\u2019s Porridge: Favorite Recipes of American Poets<\/em><\/a><\/em>.\u00a0<\/em>(The \u201cpoet cookbook\u201d genre is actually not a small one. Let\u2019s just say, as a rule, that there\u2019s an awful lot of vague, bohemian whimsy.) And symbolist cooking has always seemed to me particularly risky.<\/p>\n

On the other hand,\u00a0Allen Ginsberg\u2019s borscht is pretty good.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s occurred to me that since William Carlos Williams was a doctor, he, of all people, would have known about any negative molecular consequences of plum refrigeration. At the end of the day, he calls the plums \u201cdelicious,\u201d and that\u2014even as one knows that the line is saying more, that the illicit defiance is sweetening the snack, that this is quotidian intimacy and also intimacy cheapened by thousands of anthologies\u2014is a ringing endorsement.<\/p>\n

In any case, the Internet agreed: refrigerated plums were a go. So I refrigerated them. But far from devouring them, my husband and I have not seemed to want to eat them at all. So there they sit, maybe sweet and cold and delicious, but maybe just rotting a little more slowly.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because my neighbors were out of town, I had been offered the gift of their weekly fruit and vegetable share from Community Share Agriculture. And because they are a family of four, when I came home from the nearby church where the produce is distributed, it was with bags heavy laden with corn, summer squash, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[699,64,1671,19272,115,13791,19270,14710,165,19273,19271,19274,3915],"class_list":["post-89258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-allen-ginsberg","tag-cookbooks","tag-cooking","tag-csas","tag-food","tag-fruit","tag-john-keatss-porridge","tag-plums","tag-poetry","tag-produce","tag-refrigerators","tag-this-is-just-to-say","tag-william-carlos-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWilliams Found Plums in the Icebox\u2014Do They Belong There?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein queries the refrigeration of stone fruit.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/27\/of-plums-and-iceboxes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Of Plums and Iceboxes by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 27, 2015 \u2013 Because my neighbors were out of town, I had been offered the gift of their weekly fruit and vegetable share from Community Share Agriculture. 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