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Prune Soufflé
Take one-half pound stewed prune pulp (prepared as for soup); add juice of one lemon, three-fourths cup of sugar, and the stiff-whipped whites of four eggs. Turn into the soufflé dish, sprinkling sugar over the top and baking in brisk oven ten minutes, or till brown.
This is a prune meringue rather than a true soufflé — there is no yolk base and no butter or flour, only fruit pulp folded into whipped whites. It rises fast, browns fast, and collapses within minutes of leaving the oven.
- The prune pulp"Prepared as for soup" means prunes simmered in water until very soft, pitted, and pressed through a sieve or food mill to a thick, smooth purée. Half a pound of pulp is roughly a cup; stew dried pitted prunes in water to cover and allow for the weight they take up in cooking, so rather less than half a pound of dried fruit will be needed. The purée must be thick — watery pulp will deflate the whites.
- Brisk ovenA brisk oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400–425F. At that sort of heat ten minutes should brown the surface while the interior stays just set; the original's "or till brown" is the real test.
- Fold, do not stirThe hinge of the dish. Beat the whites to firm peaks, then fold the cooled prune purée and lemon juice in with a spatula in a few large strokes. Beating the pulp in destroys the aeration and you get a dense, weeping mass.
- Sugar and the whitesThree-quarters cup is a lot of sugar for four whites. Beating about half of it into the whites once they hold soft peaks stabilises the foam and makes it far less likely to collapse; the rest goes in with the pulp.
- The dishButter a 1½-quart straight-sided baking dish and dust it with sugar. The sprinkling of sugar over the top gives the crisp, faintly caramelised crust that the recipe is aiming at.
- Cool purée onlyThe pulp must be at room temperature or cooler before it meets the whites. Warm purée begins cooking the foam on contact.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a light dessert. Send it to the table immediately, with cold cream or a thin custard sauce; it will sink as it cools.
Prune whips and prune soufflés were everywhere in American and British cookery between about 1880 and 1930, and their popularity had as much to do with economy and health fashion as with taste: dried prunes kept indefinitely in any pantry, cost little, and were promoted heavily as a laxative in the era's domestic manuals. Because the dish uses only whites, it also paired neatly with the custards, sauces and yolk-rich cakes that filled the same books — nothing was wasted in a kitchen that treated the two halves of an egg as separate ingredients. The prune itself is simply a dried plum, most often the sugar-rich Agen type brought to California by French growers in the nineteenth century.