Home › The Plum › Stuffed Prunes
Stuffed Prunes
Soak large prunes over night then make an incision at one end large enough to remove stones, and fill space with chopped nuts and sugar; roll the prunes after this in sugar, then dry. May be kept ten days before using.
A confection rather than a cooked dish, and the whole thing hinges on the prunes being soft enough to open without tearing but dry enough on the surface to take a sugar coating.
- Choosing the fruit"Large prunes" meant whole dried plums with the stones still in; the recipe has you remove them yourself. Pitted prunes are now the default; if you use them, slit one side and pipe or spoon the filling in rather than working through the end.
- The overnight soakCold water is enough for plump modern prunes and two to three hours will often do. Older, harder fruit benefits from the full night. Drain well and blot dry, or the sugar coating will dissolve into syrup.
- The fillingNo proportions are given. Roughly equal volumes of finely chopped walnuts or almonds to granulated sugar makes a filling that holds together; a few drops of the soaking liquid or a little orange juice binds it if it crumbles.
- "Then dry"The recipe gives no method or time. It most likely means air-drying at room temperature on a rack, uncovered, until the sugar crust sets and stops feeling tacky. A very low oven with the door ajar would speed things up, though the book mentions no oven.
- Keeping them ten daysThe claim is reasonable for a sugar-coated dried fruit kept cool, dry and loosely covered. Airtight storage can trap moisture from the fruit and leave the coating syrupy; a tin or a box lined with waxed paper is safer.
- YieldA pound of large prunes gives roughly 30 to 40 pieces, depending on size, enough for a sweetmeat dish at the end of a meal.
Stuffed prunes belong to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century vogue for "fruit confections" — sweetmeats built from dried fruit and nuts rather than boiled sugar, which required no candy thermometer, no chafing dish and no particular skill, and so found a ready place in domestic-science pamphlets and church cookbooks. The prune itself was a commercial success story of the period: California orchards planted with the French d'Agen plum from the 1850s onward made dried plums cheap and widely available in American groceries, and the growers' associations pushed them hard as a wholesome food.