Photograph by Stephane von Stephane

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins this year on Wednesday night. This holiday is a bridge stretched between the past and the future. As I understand it, the two-week period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is a time for personal and spiritual clean-up. You look back at everything you did (or failed to do) during the past year, and you make amends: settle your debts, ask for forgiveness, leave old habits behind.

And to help blow the cobwebs out of your brain, and get you up and ready to do what needs to be done, comes the blast of the shofar, or ram's horn. It's a real ram's horn, blown at the end of the day's services, with a sound that's deeply weird and thrilling. It's rare that any experience comes to us unmitigated across the centuries, much less the millennia. Nothing we eat now tastes like it would have two hundred or even a hundred years ago; cooking methods, animal breeds and plant varieties, even ways of measuring ingredients have all changed and evolved, and while old recipes may give us a sense of how previous generations ate, we'll never know exactly what their bread or their apples tasted like.

Sounds, though, might remain true. A ram's horn is a ram's horn, and when it's blown, the tone rings as Biblical as manna, a tradition that reverberates down through some five thousand years. (By the Jewish calender, the upcoming year is 5771.)

As a lunar holiday, the exact date of Rosh Hashanah moves around from year to year, but it usually falls sometime between early and mid-September. The timing is perfect to fulfill the injunction to eat new fruits, part of a holiday tradition of serving sweet foods to guarantee a sweet year.

Honey, too, is always on the menu at Rosh Hashanah, scooped up with apple slices and used to sweeten round domes of raisin-studded challah bread. With the resurgence of interest in beekeeping, and especially in urban beekeeping, now is the time to find out what your neighborhood tastes like, to a bee. I'm always trying out different local honeys, so on my table this year will be Eggman Family's pomegranate-blossom honey (sold at the Saturday Alemany Farmers' Market in San Francisco) next to the "Marin Mix" honey from Marshall's Farm (widely available at many local grocery stores, as well as the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market and the Marin Farmers' Market.)

You can also drop by Saul's in Berkeley next week for Adventures in the Honey Harvest, a panel discussion and local honey tasting with Helene Marshall of Marshall's Farm Honey, Jen Radtke of Biofuel Oasis, which offers classes in urban beekeeping, and Saul's co-owner and home beekeeper Peter Levitt.

Right now, the farmers' markets are rich with the first fruits of autumn. Peaches, melons, and berries still have their allure, but this week my eyes suddenly noticed the plumpness of green and purple late-harvest figs, the golden swell of Bartlett and Asian pears, the red-striped Gravenstein apples, the first pomegranates, and in particular, the amber-skinned Italian sugar plums and dusky indigo French prune plums. These small, oval plums, harbingers of fall, are nothing like summer's juice-dripping flavor bombs made for slurpy out-of-hand eating; instead, their dense, sugary flesh and tart skins are enhanced by baking.

And this simple plum cake shows them off. It's a great family dessert that can easily double as a lazy morning coffee cake. Cinnamon seems to have a nice affinity with plums, but so does cardamom and anise. Adding a little buckwheat flour gives the cake a pleasant heft and nuttiness; you could also replace the white flour completely with whole-wheat pastry flour, or a wheat-free combination of equal parts oat and barley flours.

Not being a fan of traditional honey cake, an upside-down apple gingerbread has been my go-to holiday dessert for quite a while. But with the long-delayed warmth of summer finally upon us, something a little lighter, with the kiss of the last stone fruits upon it, seems to offer the perfect sweetness for the year to come.

Plum Cake
You could also try this with other fruits, such as sliced peaches, sliced poached quinces, or halved fresh figs.

Makes 1 cake, to serve 8

Ingredients
1/2 cup (8 tbsp) butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp ground cardamom (optional)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans, toasted
24 small Italian plums or 12 French prune plums, halved lengthwise and pitted
1 tbsp sugar mixed with 1/4 tsp cinnamon or 1/4 tsp anise seeds

Preparation

1. Grease and flour a 9" cake pan. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla.

3. In a small bowl, sift together flours, cardamom (if using), baking powder, and salt.

4. Stir half of flour mixture into butter. Add milk and stir gently to mix. Add remaining flour and stir until just smooth. Stir in all but 1 tablespoon of the nuts.

5. Spread batter in prepared pan. Arrange plums, skin side up, in concentric circles over batter. Sprinkle with nuts and cinnamon sugar or sugar and anise seeds.

6. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until cake is slightly puffed and golden brown. Let cool 10-15 minutes, then release from pan and let cool on a rack.

Adventures in the Honey Harvest will be held at Saul's Restaurant & Deli, 1475 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, on Sept. 14 from 7-8:30pm. Tickets are $5.

"splat"
"splat"
"splat"

Every night, for the past week, we've been awakened by the sound of fat, juicy plums plummeting from the trees in our backyard to the ground. We pick them as fast as we can, but some are simply out of reach, and others just sneak up on us, ripening suddenly and then hurling themselves out of the tree.

We somehow managed to pick about six pounds of plums before I decided that something must be done.

So, as I did last year, I decided to make plum jam.

A few things have changed, though, since I last made jam. First of all, I moved. Last year's plums were harvested in the heart of the Mission: small yellow plums that were subtle and pleasantly sweet-tart. We managed to spin those into many jars of jam and chutney before we moved.

Secondly, I realized that over the past year I've learned a bit about pectin. The jam we made last year, while delicious, was a bit thin and watery. I wasn't about to make that mistake again. Pectin causes jams and jellies to gel, and some fruits have more and some have less. Apples, it turns out, have a lot of pectin. So when you are trying to make jam with fruits that are low in pectin, like berries or plums, it's a good idea to use an apple, peel and all (trust me, you will never know it's even in the jam). Also, you need the right balance of pectin, acid, and sugar with the fruit to make it all balance and gel correctly.

Anyway, here in our new house we have not only one, or two, but four different plum trees. Lucky for the trees that I love plum jam too, since they've been somewhat neglected over the years (we unfortunately moved just after the plum harvest last year and missed the whole thing). And lucky for me that my husband is tall and can reach all those rogue plums, even though we still wake up every morning to a smattering of plums.

Plumalicious Jam

Makes: 13 half-pint jars

Ingredients:
About 12 cups (about 6 lbs) pitted and roughly chopped plums
1 or 2 green apples
Juice of 1 lemon or lime
2 lbs granulated sugar
2 small plates in the freezer

Preparation:
1. Cut up all the plums and put them into a heavy, 5-quart stockpot.

2. Grate the apple, skin and all (but not the core), on a box shredder-grater. Add the apples, lemon or lime juice, and sugar to the plums.

3. Stir the plum mixture thoroughly, place over medium-high heat, and bring to a boil.

4. Lower the heat to medium and let boil, skimming the foam occasionally and smashing the fruit as it cooks. Boil for about 20 minutes.

5. When the jam starts to look thickened, start testing it by spooning a small amount onto one of the chilled plates. This will chill it quickly and let you see how thick it is. Keep testing it until the jam is thick enough, but don't cook it longer than about 30-35 minutes. If it's not thick enough for your liking, next time add an extra apple. Don’t worry, the jam will still be great.

6. Once the jam has thickened, get your clean jars set up. You can re-use the glass jars, but you should get new lids and rings each time. If you have a canning funnel, it makes your life a lot easier for filling jars.

7. Fill each jar to about 1/2 inch from the top, leaving a little breathing room. Screw on the lid, but not too tight.

8. Turn the jars over at once so they stand upside down on their lids and let them cool to room temperature. This should seal the lids. If the lids are sealed, the top will be indented. You can store the jam in a cool dark place for up to a year. If not, store in the refrigerator and use within about 1 month.

Canning for me conjures up childhood memories of being in the kitchen with my mom and her friends, usually on a hot steamy Texas summer day, and "putting up" bread and butter pickles, fresh raspberry jam (with seeds!), and ripe whole tomatoes. Even with the sweat pouring down your face, there's no better time to can than in the middle of the summer, at the height of the season, when everything is bursting with flavor: crisp cucumbers, ripe red tomatoes, juicy stone fruits, plump berries. Better still when you can pick that fruit out of your own garden.

We are lucky enough to have a big shady plum tree, right smack in the middle of our little garden, right smack in the heart of the Mission in San Francisco. If you think that isn't fair, then start making friends with people who have fruit trees and vegetable gardens; we always seem to have more than we can eat or harvest and are looking for others who will enjoy it.

Tales of plum wine gone awry (think essence of gasoline) from years past still haunt my flat and the flats above me. And last year we missed the boat and the plums ripened before we could harvest them. Which meant tracking slimy fruit globs into the house, sticky matted fur on the cat, and drunken birds and rats feasting on the fermenting fruit. In an effort to avoid that joyous occurrence (have I not painted a lovely picture?), my roommate Gary (staunch believer in preparing for the revolution) made a concerted effort to rally the troops and plan for the big harvest.

So a few weeks ago, when the tree was bursting with perfectly ripe, big juicy green plums, we set aside our sunny Sunday and three of us--armed with our giant canning pot, a ladder, and numerous plastic grocery bags--plucked all of the plums we could reach.

After throwing around elaborate ideas of jams and jellies and syrups and pickles and more, including drawing up a chart of flavors that go well with plum (including but not limited to cardamom, ginger, and whisky) as well as different preparations (including roasting the plums) we arrived at a consensus: to prepare a simple plum jam that would let the tart yet subtle plum flavor shine, and a more interesting plum and apple chutney.

It took all day, but after a while, the cold beers came out, the sweat started pouring down our faces, and it was all worth it.

G-Street Plum Chutney
Makes about 14 8-oz jars

2 cups sugar (or a bit less if the plums are very sweet)
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
1 cup water
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks cinnamon, broken into 1-inch pieces
1 2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and thickly sliced
1 teaspoon whole allspice
Cheesecloth
About 6 1/2 lbs plums, pitted and quartered
2 large apples, such as Granny Smith, peeled, cored, and diced
1/2 large yellow onion, peeled and finely diced

In a large, heavy pot, combine the sugar, vinegar, water, and salt. In a 6-inch square of cheesecloth, tie the cinnamon sticks, ginger, and allspice into a pouch and add it to the pot. Heat the mixture over medium-high heat until boiling, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about 5 minutes until the mixture becomes syrupy.

Add the plums, apples, and onions. Cook, stirring often, over low heat, until the mixture is thickened, about 40-60 minutes. Remove the spice bag. Seal in hot sterilized jars.

For proper canning instructions, check out:

A very serious and official guide

A good online step-by-step guide

Paul and Bernice, who are awesome!

special thanks to Gary and Keith for the lovely plummy pix