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Prune Pudding
Wash and stone a pound of prunes. Blanch the kernels, and simmer them with three-quarters of a pint of water, a glassful of port, and a table-spoonful of sugar, till they are quite soft. Line a mould with pieces of the crumb of bread which have been soaked in clarified butter. Pour in the stewed prunes gently, so as not to displace the bread, and add a table-spoonful of marmalade. Cover the fruit with a layer of bread, tie a piece of buttered paper over the top, and bake in a moderate oven. Or, stew the fruit as above, mix with it half an ounce of dissolved isinglass, pour it into a mould, and when it is set, turn out, and serve. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost of prunes, 4d. to 1s. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
The pudding itself is a plain bread-lined charlotte, but the second sentence puts the prune kernels into the pot, and that is the part that cannot be carried over.
- The kernels are the problemPrunes are dried plums, and plum kernels — like apricot and bitter almond kernels — contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the crushed or chewed kernel meets moisture and enzymes. Kernels of this kind were sometimes used as a cheap stand-in for bitter almonds, for that marzipan note, though how general the practice was is hard to establish.
- The quantity is not trivialA pound of prunes yields something on the order of forty to sixty kernels, all of which are simmered into a dish said to serve six to eight — roughly six to ten kernels a head. Poisonings have been reported from apricot kernels, which are larger and generally richer in amygdalin, at quantities in that region, and children are affected at lower doses.
- Blanching does not fix it"Blanch the kernels" means slipping off the brown skins in hot water, which is a cosmetic step, not a detoxifying one. Prolonged simmering drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but a covered pan and a short stew retain an unpredictable amount, and there is no way to judge it in a domestic kitchen.
- IsinglassThe alternative jellied version sets the stewed fruit with isinglass, a gelatine made from fish swim bladders, historically sturgeon and later cod and other species. It is still sold, mainly to brewers and winemakers as a fining agent, but it is not a supermarket item and modern leaf gelatine is not measured in the same way.
- A glassfulA "glassful" of wine in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at about two fluid ounces, not a modern generous pour. The measurement is genuinely loose.
- What to make insteadA bread-and-butter charlotte of stewed prunes, port and marmalade is a good dish and worth making from a current recipe that leaves the stones out altogether. The flavour the kernels were there to supply comes from a drop of almond extract.
Cassell's arranged its dictionary so that a single heading could carry two quite different puddings — one baked in a bread-lined mould, one set cold with isinglass — and this entry is a good example of that economy. Both depend on the French dried plum trade. The bread crumb soaked in clarified butter and packed against the mould is the standard charlotte construction, generally traced to the early nineteenth-century repertoire of French pastry cooks working in England, and marmalade appears here as it does in dozens of Victorian sweet dishes. The kernels, now the reason the recipe has to be read rather than cooked, were simply thrift — a free flavouring extracted from something that would otherwise be thrown away.