Prune Ices
For a simple ice simmer one pound of prunes till tender, remove pits, and put through coarse sieve. This may be used with the foundation syrup for water ices, adding juice of one lemon for each pint of the mixture. It may also be added to the foundation ice cream or custard (see Introductory Recipes), or the stewed prunes, pitted, may be packed and frozen (whole) with the addition of any tart fruit juice.
A dried-fruit ice from the era of hand-cranked freezers, written in shorthand because it depends on two "foundation" recipes printed elsewhere in the book. Reconstructing those is most of the work.
- The foundation syrupThe book prints it elsewhere; water-ice syrups of the period run to something in the region of equal parts sugar and water, boiled until clear and cooled. Sugar is not optional here: it is what keeps the ice scoopable rather than a solid brick.
- Proportions the recipe omitsOne pound of prunes yields about 2 cups of thick purée. Figure equal parts purée and cooled syrup, then taste; prunes are sweet but flat, and the lemon is doing the work of making it read as fruit.
- Lemon per pintJuice of one lemon to each pint of mixture is a lot of acid by modern habit, but it is correct for prune, which has almost no brightness of its own. Add it after the mixture is cold, since heat dulls it.
- Sieve, not blender"Coarse sieve" means skins held back and pulp pushed through. A food mill, or a coarse sieve, gives the slightly grainy body intended; a blender works the skins into the purée, which is not what the recipe asks for.
- Prunes and pitsSimmer in just enough water to cover, 20-30 minutes for ordinary dried prunes, and keep the cooking liquid — it is worth adding back for flavour. Buy pitted prunes and skip the step if you like; the recipe assumes unpitted fruit.
- Freezing without a churnAn ice-cream machine handles this directly. Still-frozen in a shallow pan, break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for the first two to three hours or the purée sets hard and sandy.
- The frozen-whole variationPacking pitted stewed prunes with tart fruit juice and freezing them gives something closer to a frozen compote than an ice. Serve it barely frozen and slightly slushy; fully hard, whole prunes are unpleasant to eat.
- YieldAbout a quart from the quantities above, serving six to eight. Prune ice is rich and dark-flavoured, so small portions suit it.
Prunes — dried plums — were one of the cheapest and most reliable fruits in the American pantry when this book was written, sold by the pound and stocked year-round in households that saw fresh plums for only a few weeks. That availability explains why an ice made from stewed prunes was considered worth printing at all: it was a way to serve a frozen fruit dessert in winter. California's Santa Clara Valley had become the dominant prune-growing region in the country by the turn of the twentieth century, and prunes carried a strong reputation as a healthful, digestible food, which recipe writers of the period were happy to trade on. The instruction to fall back on a "foundation syrup" or "foundation ice cream" is typical of the genre — cookbooks of the era printed base recipes once at the front and expected the reader to flip back, a habit that makes many of these short entries look sparser than they are.