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For Sauce (Lb prunes wineglassful sherry)
1/2 lb. prunes 1 wineglassful sherry wine 1 lemon 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon For pudding. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add carrots, potatoes, raisins, currants, crumbs, flour, baking powder, salt, and milk. Turn into Criscoed mold, cover, and steam steadily for three hours.
For sauce. Soak prunes in water over night, after first washing them. Next day put them in pan with water they were soaked in, just enough to cover them, simmer gently until quite soft. Do not allow to boil, or fruit will be spoiled. Take out stones, crack some, and save kernels. Rub prunes through sieve, add sherry, kernels blanched, grated rind and strained lemon juice, and cinnamon, and then, if thicker then, if thicker than rich cream, add more wine, or water, and use.
This page runs two recipes together: the tail of a steamed carrot-and-potato pudding and the prune sauce meant to go with it. The sauce as printed calls for eating the kernels inside the prune stones, which is the reason for the warning above.
- The prune kernels are the problemPrune stones are plum stones, and the kernel inside contains amygdalin, the same cyanogenic glycoside that makes bitter almonds dangerous. Chewed or crushed and moistened, it releases hydrogen cyanide; blanching, as directed here, does not destroy it. A sauce built on an unmeasured number of cracked kernels has no way of staying within a safe dose.
- Why the book asks for themCracked stone-fruit kernels were used as a flavouring in this period, in much the way almond extract is used, and cookbooks of the era often treat them as an economy rather than a risk. Modern almond flavouring, natural or synthetic benzaldehyde, gives the same taste with none of the chemistry. If you want this sauce, work from a current recipe.
- The pudding ingredients are missingThe ingredient list on this page belongs to the sauce alone. The pudding method refers back to carrots, potatoes, raisins, currants, crumbs, flour, baking powder, salt and milk in quantities printed elsewhere in the book, so the pudding cannot be made from what is here.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote it. Crisco in 1915 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and blander than today's reformulated product; any solid vegetable shortening stands in, and butter changes the flavour more than the texture.
- A wineglassfulIn period usage this is roughly 2 fluid ounces, about a quarter cup, not the volume of a modern wine glass.
- "Do not allow to boil"This instruction applies to the prunes, and it is sound: a hard boil bursts the skins and turns the fruit to shreds before it is soft enough to sieve. Bare simmering keeps the flesh intact for the sieve.
- Steaming the puddingThree hours of steady steam means the water must never go off the boil and must be topped up from the kettle with boiling water, not cold. The mould is covered so condensation does not fall back onto the batter.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble as an advertising cookbook for Crisco, which had gone on sale a few years earlier; the recipes lean throughout on the new shortening, and the pudding here is "Criscoed" into its mould rather than buttered. The pudding itself is an old British Christmas form, bound with crumbs and dried fruit and steamed for hours in a covered basin — and the prune sauce does the work of a brandy butter, sieved fruit loosened with sherry to the consistency of thick cream. Cracking a few of the stones for their kernels was routine practice at the time, an almond flavour got for nothing from fruit already bought, and it appears in cookery books on both sides of the Atlantic well into the twentieth century, long after the chemistry behind it was understood.