Home › The Principles of Cookery › French Plum Tart
French Plum Tart
Stew French plums with sugar, in the proportion of half to the weight of fruit. Put half a pound of plums and a quarter of a pound of sugar, with half a glass of water or red wine, into a stewpan; cover, and stew very gently until the stones can be taken away easily. Crush some of them, and put the kernels with the plums in the stewpan. Edge a dish with puff paste, put in the plums, etc., cover with a paste, bake, and serve hot. Time, three-quarters of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a small tart.
The tart itself is a plain covered fruit pie, but the instruction to crush the stones and add the kernels puts it outside what can be recommended today. The notes below explain the terms and the hazard.
- The kernels are the problemPlum and prune stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened — exactly what this recipe directs. The quantity is left entirely to the cook ("crush some of them"), with no upper limit and no indication of kernel size or bitterness, so there is no way to know what dose ends up in the dish.
- Cooking does not remove itGentle stewing under a lid and three-quarters of an hour in the oven will drive off some hydrogen cyanide, but the process is neither reliable nor measurable in a closed tart. Kernels were used freely in period cookery for their almond flavour. A current recipe should be used instead.
- "French plums"Not fresh fruit. In Victorian usage the term means large dried plums — prunes imported from France, sold whole with the stone in. That is why they need stewing until the stones loosen.
- "Half a glass"An imprecise Victorian measure, somewhere in the region of a quarter to a third of a cup of liquid. With dried fruit the amount needed depends on how dry the prunes are.
- The sugar proportionHalf the weight of the fruit is very sweet by modern standards, and it is calculated for dried plums, which are already concentrated. Period dried plums may well have been drier than the soft, semi-dried fruit sold today.
- "Edge a dish with puff paste"A strip of pastry laid around the rim of a pie dish to give the lid something to seal against — the filling sits directly in the dish, not in a full lined case. "Probable cost, 1s." is a shilling, a fair sum for a small household tart.
The recipe depends on an item that was a fixture of the Victorian store cupboard: the imported dried plum, sold as a "French plum" and associated above all with Agen in the Lot-et-Garonne, whose prunes reached Britain through the nineteenth century. Because dried plums keep well, they gave cooks a fruit tart in months when no fresh fruit was available, and prune tarts, prune moulds and stewed prunes recur in period cookery books. The habit of cracking the stones for their kernels belongs to the same instinct that put bitter almonds and peach kernels into custards and ratafias: the kernel of a stone fruit carries a strong almond scent, and before commercial flavouring extracts were cheap it was a free source of it. Instructions like this one survived in print long after the chemistry of prussic acid was understood.