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PLUM KATESCHALE (a German dish for hot weather)
Take one pound of sound ripe plums, put them into a deep earthen jar, sprinkle over them a quarter of a pound of lump-sugar, and pour half a pint of water over them. Tie two or three folds of paper over the jar, and set it in a pan three-parts full of boiling water, which must be kept boiling until the plums are quite soft; then lift the jar out, and put it aside until the next day. Press the pulp through a tamis. Crack the stones, and boil the kernels, with the thick part which will not pass the strainer, half a stick of cinnamon, and two cloves, in half a pint of water for twenty minutes. Strain the liquid into the fruit. Add a little sugar to taste, and wine--claret for red plums, and light Rhine wine for green ones--with a little more water, if liked. Serve the fruit in a compote dish, with a slice of toast cut into dice, and thrown when cold into the fruit. Time, two days to prepare. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A chilled fruit soup, and the fruit part of it is unremarkable — but the second stage, in which the cracked plum stones are simmered and their liquid poured back into the purée, is the reason this page carries a warning. Notes below on that, and on the vocabulary.
- The kernels are the problemPlum stones contain amygdalin, which the kernel's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and wetted. The recipe cracks the stones from a full pound of plums, extracts the kernels into water, and strains that water back into the dish rather than discarding it. Bitter almond, apricot and peach kernels were used in the same way in Victorian kitchens for their marzipan-like flavour; prussic acid was recognised as a poison by this date, though the hazard of kernel flavourings was not consistently heeded.
- Twenty minutes' boiling is not a safeguardTwenty minutes' boiling is not a reliable safeguard -- Heat destroys the enzyme, but hydrogen cyanide already released is not destroyed by cooking; some is driven off with the steam and some stays in the very liquid that is then strained into the fruit. The text gives no quantity of kernels and no way to judge the dose, which is why a current recipe should be used instead.
- Half a pint, BritishCassell's pints are imperial: half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups, not one cup.
- Lump sugarA quarter of a pound is 4 oz, roughly half a cup of granulated. Loaf or lump sugar was simply refined sugar broken from a cone or pressed block; nothing about it behaves differently.
- TamisA tamis is a drum-shaped horsehair or wire sieve, worked with a wooden pestle or the heel of the hand. A fine-mesh conical strainer or a food mill does the same job.
- The jar in the panPaper tied over an earthenware jar standing in a pan of water is a water bath: no direct heat and little reduction. The recipe directs that the water be kept boiling, and the plums soften in the added sugar and half-pint of water rather than over the fire.
- Yield and serviceFour to five, as stated, served cold in a compote dish, with the diced toast thrown in when cold as the recipe directs. The wine is added uncooked, and the original prices the dish at 8d. "exclusive of the wine."
The name is a garbled English rendering of the German Kaltschale — literally "cold bowl" — a family of chilled sweet fruit soups thickened only by their own purée, popular across northern Germany and the Baltic in summer and generally served as a light supper or a dessert rather than as a first course. The recipe's reliance on a paper-covered jar standing in a pan of boiling water reflects a period when many kitchens had no dependable low heat other than a water bath. The kernel infusion belongs to an older confectioner's habit of treating stone-fruit pits as a free flavouring, the same instinct behind noyau, ratafia and the almond-scented puddings that fill nineteenth-century cookbooks — a habit that survives today mainly in commercially prepared extracts, from which the cyanogenic component is removed in processing.