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Prune Pudding
Scald one pound French prunes, let them swell in the hot water till soft, drain and extract the stones, spread on a dish and dredge with flour; take a gill milk from a quart, stir into it gradually eight table-spoons sifted flour; beat six eggs very light and stir by degrees into the remainder of quart of milk, alternating with the batter; add prunes, one at a time, stir the whole very hard, boil. two hours, and serve with wine-sauce or cream. - Mrs. Emma L. Fay..
A boiled batter pudding of the kind that once needed nothing but a pot, a cloth and a free burner. The proportions are egg-heavy and flour-light, so the finished texture is closer to a firm baked custard studded with fruit than to a cakey steamed pudding.
- The hinge: keep the water at a bare simmerTwo hours at a rolling boil will curdle a pudding this rich in egg and drive water into it if any gets past the cover. Hold the pot at a lazy simmer and top up only with boiling water so the temperature never drops.
- A gillHalf a cup. The gill of milk is taken from the quart and used to make a smooth paste with the flour first; the rest of the quart goes in with the eggs. That order is what prevents lumps.
- Eight table-spoons of flourHalf a cup for a full quart of milk and six eggs. That is genuinely little, and it is not an error of transcription in spirit: the eggs do the setting. Expect a soft, custardy slice rather than a sliceable cake.
- "French prunes"Dried plums, in the period usually the large Agen type sold with stones in. Modern pitted prunes need no stoning and only a brief soak in hot water, not a long swell; oversoaked they collapse into the batter.
- Why dredge the prunes with flourA dry flour coating keeps the wet fruit from sliding straight to the bottom of a thin batter. Do it just before the fruit goes in, and add the pieces gradually as directed rather than dumping them.
- The vesselButter a large pudding basin or mold well (allow at least 3 quarts for this quantity of batter, which is close to 2 quarts before it rises), fill it no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with a buttered lid or pleated foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with water reaching halfway up. A floured cloth was the older method and works, but a covered mold is far more forgiving.
- Testing and turning outAfter two hours a skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should feel set at the edges. Rest it ten minutes in the mold before inverting, or the soft center will slump.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is butter and sugar creamed, thinned with sherry or Madeira and warmed without boiling. Cream, as the recipe allows, suits the prunes just as well.
- YieldA quart of milk and six eggs makes a substantial pudding for eight.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) gathered its contents from named contributors like Mrs. Emma L. Fay, and boiled puddings occupy a large share of its dessert pages for a practical reason: a pot of simmering water needed no oven management on a wood range, and it could sit unattended through the last hours of a meal's preparation. Prunes earn their place in a Midwestern winter book because they kept well and turned back into fruit with hot water when nothing fresh was to be had. "French prunes" generally meant imported dried plums, commonly associated with the Agen district of southwestern France, and they were sold graded by size and usually with the stones in — hence the instruction to swell, drain and extract, a step no longer needed with modern pitted fruit. The wine sauce reflects an older English habit of serving a sweetened butter sauce enriched with sherry, which recurs beside boiled puddings in nineteenth-century American cookbooks.