These Tiny Tart Plums From Cornwall Make a Scarce Dessert Delicacy
Chefs are competing for Kea plums, an unusual fruit that grows only in a tiny 20-acre patch of Britain.
Kea plums
Photographer: Catherine Losing for Bloomberg Businessweek
It was in the 1730s, perhaps, that this story starts, all thanks to a few scurvy-fearing Portuguese seamen who’d sailed north to the English Channel to help fight the French. They needed their vitamin C, and preserved plums were the preferred source. After the stones were tossed overboard, they’d wash up on England’s southwestern coast.
The region, marked by high humidity, low soil pH, and reliably misty mornings, was ideal for the far-from-home fruit. The stones took root and grew into trees bearing small, tart, and bright-flavored fruit that locals named after their parish: Kea plums. In Portugal the same species of trees began to die out; today the only place in the world where they flourish is a single valley in Cornwall, only 20 acres on the grounds of the Tregothnan country estate.