Home › The Principles of Cookery › Raisins, Stewed
Raisins, Stewed
Take as many raisins as may be wanted and stone them; then cover with cold water, and let them soak for a few hours--ten or twelve if convenient. Then cook them in a stone jar or stewpan, either on the hot plate of a range or in the oven, which can scarcely be too slow. The raisins will swell a good deal, and no sugar is wanted unless they are dry and poor. They are nourishing and easily digested, and possess laxative properties.
A plain invalid-cookery dish that assumes seeded muscatel or Malaga raisins and a coal range that held a low steady heat all day. The whole point is very long, very gentle cooking.
- Stoning the raisinsRaisins of this period were commonly sold with the seeds still in, hence the instruction to stone them. Modern seedless raisins or sultanas skip this step entirely; large muscat raisins, if you find them, may still need splitting and picking out.
- "Scarcely be too slow"The text asks only for the lowest heat you can manage; in a modern oven that means the lowest setting it will hold (somewhere around 250-275F on most). On the stovetop, the barest simmer with a lid — the fruit should never bubble hard enough to break up.
- TimingThe original gives none. Expect roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours in a low oven after the long soak; the raisins are done when plump, glossy and sitting in a thin syrup.
- The soak mattersThe recipe asks for a few hours, ten or twelve if convenient, and it is the soaking that gives the swollen, tender fruit. A short soak will generally mean less plump results for the same stewing time.
- Stone jarA lidded earthenware or stoneware jar, used because it heats slowly and evenly. A small covered casserole dish or a heavy enamelled pot does the same job.
- Water and sugarCover by about an inch; the fruit absorbs most of it. Sugar is genuinely unnecessary with today's plump dried fruit, though a strip of lemon peel or a cinnamon stick suits the finished dish.
- Yield and serving1/2 lb (about 1 1/2 cups) of raisins swells to roughly 3 cups and serves four. Eat warm or cold, alone or spooned over rice pudding, semolina or plain custard.
This belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of invalid and nursery cookery, where fruit was stewed to the point of being almost pre-digested and the recipe's virtues were listed medically rather than gastronomically — "nourishing and easily digested, and possess laxative properties" is the selling point, not the flavour. Raisins were among the cheapest and most reliably available dried goods in a British household, shipped in from Spain, Greece and later California, and stewed fruit was a standard part of the sickroom diet alongside beef tea, arrowroot and barley water. Prunes were prescribed in the same spirit for the same purpose.