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Prune Pudding (One pound of prunes stewed)
One pound of prunes stewed and chopped, one cup of sugar, stir in the beaten whites of four eggs, one-half teaspoon of cream of tartar. Bake twenty minutes. Serve cool with whipped cream.
— Mrs. J. Fred Decker
This is a prune whip in its baked form: a stiff meringue carrying a heavy load of stewed fruit. The original assumes you know what oven and what dish, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A baked whip of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F; hotter and the meringue browns and weeps before the centre sets. Twenty minutes at that heat is about right for a shallow dish.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe instruction says "stir in the beaten whites." Beat the whites to firm peaks with the cream of tartar, then fold the prune-and-sugar mixture in by thirds. Stirring deflates the whole thing and you get a dense sweet paste.
- PrunesOne pound of dried prunes, pitted, stewed in water until soft and drained well before chopping. Prunes of the period were often sold with stones in; check, and drain thoroughly, since excess liquid is what makes the pudding collapse.
- Cream of tartarHere it is a meringue stabiliser, not a leavener. Half a teaspoon for four whites is about the usual proportion, roughly an eighth of a teaspoon per white; add it once the whites are frothy.
- SugarA cup of sugar with a pound of prunes is sweet by modern taste, and prunes bring their own sugar. Two-thirds of a cup works if you prefer the fruit to read as fruit.
- DishButter a 1 1/2-quart baking dish or a deep pie plate. A pan set in hot water would give a gentler set.
- Serving and yieldServes six. It falls as it cools, which is expected; serve at room temperature or chilled with lightly sweetened whipped cream, as directed.
Prune whip belongs to a whole family of fruit-and-egg-white desserts "apple snow, prune souffle, fruit sponge" that let a cook build a substantial dish from cheap dried fruit and a few eggs. Prunes were the workhorse of the American pantry in that era: shelf-stable, sourced from California orchards, and pressed on households by domestic-science writers who admired them as wholesome, digestible and inexpensive. Baking the whip gave it enough body to be spooned out in portions. Its appearance among the village receipts here, credited to a named contributor, is typical of community cookbooks.