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Individual Prune Puddings
Make as above but bake in cups or ramekins, serving cold with whipped cream. "PRUIN SAUCE" (Squire Hardcastle) "Certainly there is no better relish for game, mutton, lamb, fowls of every sort, even roast pork, provided it be tender and crisp enough. Wash a pound of small prunes and put them on in plenty of cold water with the juice of two lemons and their thin yellow peel, four blades of mace, two dozen whole cloves, and a bunch of whole allspice, reinforced with a single peppercorn. Cook for two hours, simmering gently and filling up as the water wastes. Then put in two cups of sugar and simmer another hour until the syrup is thick and rich. Then add a half cup of cider vinegar, let boil five minutes, and your sauce is done. It is in truth a very rich, sweet pickle, which will keep indefinitely.
Martha McCulloch Williams."
Two things sit on this page: a variation on the preceding prune pudding, and a spiced prune relish quoted from another writer. Both need a little translating.
- "Make as above"The pudding directions depend on the recipe immediately preceding it in the book, which you need in hand before starting. Baked in cups or ramekins rather than one dish, they will set faster than a single large pudding, so follow the temperature of the recipe above and start checking well before the time it gives.
- Serving the puddingsThey are served cold with whipped cream, so they can be baked ahead and chilled; the recipe does not say whether they are turned out or served in the cups.
- Blades of maceA blade is one piece of the dried lacy aril, not a measured spoonful. Four blades is a modest amount, and conversions to ground mace vary, so err on the small side; ground mace will also cloud the syrup where whole blades can be fished out.
- "A bunch of whole allspice"Genuinely vague. A tablespoon of whole berries suits a pound of prunes; more than that and the allspice takes over. The single peppercorn is not a misprint, it is there for a faint bite behind the sweetness.
- Tie up the spicesThe recipe never says to strain them out, and three hours of simmering will scatter cloves and allspice through the fruit. A muslin bag or a tea ball saves picking them out of a relish you intend to serve with meat.
- The three-hour scheduleTwo hours of gentle simmering with the lemon and spices, topping up with water as it reduces; then the sugar and an hour more; then the vinegar for five minutes at a boil. Sugar added early can firm fruit skins before they soften, which may be why it goes in late.
- Prunes have changedModern pitted prunes are softer and moister than the small dried plums this was written for, and will collapse well short of three hours. Use whole unpitted dried plums if you can find them, and start checking at the one-hour mark.
- "Will keep indefinitely"It is sugar-heavy and acidified with lemon and vinegar, which is why the original is confident, but treat it as a refrigerator preserve in a clean covered jar and use it within a few weeks. Do not follow the phrase as licence to store it on a shelf.
- YieldA pound of prunes with two cups of sugar gives roughly a pint and a half of finished sauce, enough for a large joint with some left over.
The pudding here is a plain nursery dish dressed up, and books of this period lean heavily on prunes, which kept year-round and were cheap before refrigerated shipping. The sauce is the more interesting half. Spiced sweet-sour fruit served alongside roast meat is an old English habit that survived strongly in American cookery, where damson cheese, spiced currants, pickled peaches and crab apples all did the work that cranberry sauce alone does now. The recipe is credited to Martha McCulloch Williams, a Tennessee-born writer remembered for her writing on Southern cooking, and it is given here under the name "Squire Hardcastle". Her own description is the honest one: this is not a sauce in the modern sense but a rich sweet pickle, closer to chutney than to gravy, and the cider vinegar going in at the very end is what keeps three hours of sugar from cloying.