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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 teaspoonful of moist sugar, and a pinch of powdered cinnamon. Simmer gently for ten minutes, then rub the sauce with the back of wooden spoon through a coarse sieve. If the pulp is too thick, dilute it with a little water. Time, one hour.
A Victorian fruit sauce for boiled and steamed puddings, but one instruction in it puts the whole thing out of bounds: the stones are cracked and the kernels cooked into the sauce.
- The kernels are the problemPrune and plum kernels contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the seed is crushed, chewed or wetted. Blanching does not remove the amygdalin, and while cooking destroys the enzyme that liberates the cyanide and drives off some of the volatile gas, what remains in a sauce like this is not a quantity to guess at. A quarter pound of prunes yields roughly a dozen kernels.
- Why the period cook did itThe kernels were prized for a bitter-almond perfume, the same flavour then obtained from bitter almonds, peach kernels and noyau. All carry the same cyanogenic compound, and all have largely disappeared from domestic use, though bitter-almond flavouring and noyau liqueurs are still made commercially in forms from which the hazard has been removed.
- Sieving does not make it safeRubbing the sauce through a coarse sieve holds back the solids but not what has already dissolved into the liquid. The flavour the recipe is after and the hazard travel together.
- What to do insteadUse a current prune sauce recipe. Prunes, wine, lemon and cinnamon are all sound; it is only the kernels that make this version unusable.
- Reading the rest of the textA glassful here is usually taken to mean a wine glass, conventionally about 2 fl oz. Moist sugar is a soft, damp sugar, generally light brown. The closing "Time, one hour" most likely gives the total time for the dish rather than the length of the final simmer.