When we think of plums we tend to think 'Victoria, the well-marketed plum dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, but there are many earlier high-quality plum varieties, the cultivation of which was at its peak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although plums were grown in Roman times, it was in the Middle Ages that the plum achieved recognition, grown as it was in many monasteries. Its name was applied to any dried fruit, including sultanas, currants and raisins, so when the sixteenth-century rhyme about Little Jack Horner states that 'he stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum' he was probably in fact pulling out a raisin. In Victorian times, plums were more frequently cooked in pies, sometimes alongside whole almonds and chopped hazelnuts or with roasted walnuts. As fellow members of the apricot family, plums are natural bedfellows of the almonds.