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Prune Pudding
Soak over night half pound prunes; cook them next day in water until soft, then chop fine with a knife; sweeten to taste, and cook prunes and sugar together until they are a little thick, then beat the whites of five eggs very stiff, and add, reserving enough to put on the top in little rocks. Place in the oven just long enough, to brown the egg rocks.
A prune whip in the older style: sweetened prune pulp lightened with stiff whites, then given a few minutes in the oven to color the meringue on top. The recipe assumes you know when to stop, so the notes below fill in the numbers.
- PitsThe original takes for granted that the prunes are stoned before chopping. Half a pound of dried prunes with pits yields noticeably less pulp than half a pound of pitted ones; buy pitted and you will have roughly 1 1/2 cups to work with.
- Soaking and cookingAn overnight soak in cold water, then a simmer until the fruit collapses, usually 20 to 30 minutes. Modern pitted prunes are softer than the harder, more heavily dried fruit of the period and may need only 15 minutes.
- "Sweeten to taste"About 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar suits 8 oz of prunes. Cook it down until the mixture mounds on a spoon rather than running off it; a wet purée will weep under the meringue and separate in the dish.
- The hinge: cool the puréeLet the thickened prunes cool to lukewarm before folding in the whites. Hot fruit deflates a stiff meringue on contact and you lose the whole point of five egg whites.
- Folding, not beating"Add" here means fold in gently with a spatula. Reserve about a quarter of the whites for the "rocks" spooned in peaks over the surface.
- OvenThe recipe names no oven term at all, so any figure is the modern reader's choice: 350F and 8 to 12 minutes will color the peaks -- just until they are tinged brown. Longer and the meringue toughens and shrinks.
- Egg whites and donenessA few minutes at 350F browns the surface but does not bring the interior of the folded whites to a temperature that pasteurizes them. If you are serving anyone who should avoid lightly cooked egg, use pasteurized whites.
- Yield and servingServes four to six from a 1 1/2-quart dish. Puddings of this kind were often sent to the table warm or cold with thin cream or a soft custard sauce, which offsets the fruit's slight tartness.
Prune whips, prune soufflés and prune "sponges" fill the dessert chapters of American cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1920s, and this one is typical of the genre: dried fruit, sugar, egg whites, no butter, no flour, no cream. Prunes were the cheapest reliable fruit a household could keep on the shelf year-round, arriving in bulk from California's Santa Clara Valley, which by the turn of the century dominated the domestic trade. Egg-white desserts also carried a faintly medicinal respectability -- they were considered light and easily digested, which is why they turn up so often in invalid cookery and in the plain-living dessert lists of books that also cover breakfast and supper. The whites-only construction presumably had a practical side too, since it left a cook with yolks to use elsewhere, though the recipes themselves say nothing about where they went.