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Prune Shortcake
Flavour stewed prunes with orange, cherry, or other tart fruit juice, mash to a pulp and serve as for strawberry shortcake. (See Strawberries.)
A three-line recipe that leans entirely on a cross-reference, so most of the work is in knowing what the strawberry shortcake it points to actually was. Prunes carry no acid of their own, which is why the fruit juice is not optional.
- What "shortcake" means hereNot sponge cake and not the sweetened biscuit-shaped things sold in supermarkets. An American shortcake of this period is a rich baking-powder biscuit dough, baked as one large round or as individual cakes, split while hot, buttered, and filled and topped with the fruit. Whipped cream on top or alongside was usual but not universal.
- Prunes are dried plumsSoak them in water an hour or two before stewing, then simmer covered until completely soft, 25-40 minutes depending on how dry they are. Buy pitted or pit them after stewing, when the stones slip out easily.
- The acid is the pointStewed prunes on their own are flat, sweet and slightly muddy. The orange, cherry or other tart juice is doing what the strawberries would have done in the original dish. Add it after stewing, off the heat, and taste as you go; two to three tablespoons per cup of pulp is a reasonable starting point.
- Texture of the pulpMash by hand with a fork or potato masher rather than blitzing in a processor. Prune skins pureed at speed turn the mixture dark and gluey; a coarse mash holds up better against a hot biscuit.
- SweeteningThe recipe gives none, assuming the cook will judge it. Prunes are already sugary, so sweeten only after the juice has gone in, and go light -- a tablespoon or two of sugar for a shortcake's worth of pulp.
- Assemble hot, serve at onceSplit biscuits absorb fruit fast. Fill and top no more than a few minutes before it goes to table, or the cake collapses into pudding.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a pound of dried prunes stews down to something in the region of three to four cups of pulp, which will fill and top one shortcake for a table of six.
Shortcake with strawberries is often said to have been the American summer dessert of the nineteenth century, and books of this sort seem to have concerned themselves with what to do in the other ten months of the year. The prune version belongs to that off-season logic: dried fruit was cheap, kept indefinitely on a shelf, and could be stewed into something resembling fresh fruit whenever the biscuit dough was mixed. California's prune orchards expanded sharply in the closing decades of the 1800s, and cheap domestic prunes turned up in cookery books of the era in far more guises than stewed-for-breakfast -- in pies, whips, souffles and cakes. The instruction to add orange or cherry juice is the tell that the writer knew exactly what was missing: a prune has plenty of sugar and almost no bite, and a shortcake built for strawberries needs the sharpness to cut the butter and cream.