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Prune Sauce for Puddings
Wash a quarter of a pound of prunes, and simmer them in as much water as will cover them until they are quite soft. Drain and stone them, and blanch the kernels. Put fruit and kernels into a stewpan with the liquid in which they were boiled, a glassful of wine, the strained juice of half a lemon, a small strip of thin lemon-rind, a tea-spoonful of moist sugar, and a pinch of powdered cinnamon. Simmer gently for ten minutes, then rub the sauce with the back of a wooden spoon through a coarse sieve. If the pulp is too thick, dilute it with a little water. Time, one hour. Probable cost of prunes, 4d. to 1s. per pound. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A simple sweet fruit sauce, except for one step that no modern cook should follow: the recipe has you crack the prune stones and cook the kernels in the sauce.
- The kernels are the problemPlum stones (a prune is a dried plum) contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted. European food-safety assessments of related kernels, chiefly apricot, put the acute reference dose low enough that a single kernel can exceed it for an adult, and the sauce here is built on roughly a dozen of them.
- Sieving does not fix itRubbing the pulp through a sieve holds back the solid kernel fragments but not what has already dissolved into the ten minutes of simmering liquid. Heat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but not reliably or measurably in ordinary gentle simmering.
- Why it was doneThe blanched kernels most likely served as a cheap stand-in for bitter almond or noyau flavouring, which is the same chemistry deliberately courted. A current prune sauce recipe should be used instead.
- Wineglass'A glassful of wine' is conventionally read as a wineglass measure, about 2 fluid ounces or a quarter cup, not a modern 6 oz pour.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light brown sugar rather than white granulated.
- The stated time and cost"Time, one hour" covers the whole operation including the first slow simmer to soften the fruit, not the ten-minute finish. The prices are pre-decimal pence and shillings and only tell you that prunes ranged from very cheap to a luxury grade.
- YieldA quarter pound of prunes, about 115 g, plus the cooking liquid and wine gives perhaps a cupful of thick sauce, which is presumably what the book means by sufficient for six as an accompaniment to a boiled or baked pudding.
Cassell's belongs to the late-Victorian wave of large household dictionaries, and its pudding sauces reflect a kitchen where dried fruit was a year-round staple while fresh fruit was seasonal and dear. Prunes reached Britain in quantity from France and later California, and a stewed-prune sauce sharpened with lemon and spiced with cinnamon sits close to the sweet fruit sauces of German and Central European cooking, where prunes dress everything from dumplings to boiled meats. The instruction to blanch the kernels is pure Victorian thrift joined to Victorian taste: the almond-bitter note of a cracked stone was a free stand-in for the ratafia and noyau flavourings the period loved.