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Grapes
Prunes cooked in this way are delicious. It takes a little time to prepare them, but is worth the trouble. Take two pounds of ripe Muscatel grapes, wash, strip from the bunches into a saucepan, add a very little water (distilled) and stew gently until tender, crushing the grapes to extract all the flavor and juice, then strain. Wash a pound of prunes, cover with the grape juice and stew until the prunes absorb most of the juice. Or the prunes and grapes can be stewed together, the grapes crushed and the seeds skimmed off as they rise to the top.
A two-ingredient compote in which grape juice replaces the sugar syrup prunes are usually stewed in. The heading says "Grapes," but the dish is the prunes; the grapes are only there to make the cooking liquid.
- The hingeEverything depends on reducing the grape juice into the prunes rather than boiling them in a bath of liquid. Keep the pan at a bare simmer, uncovered for the last stretch, and stop when the fruit is glossy and the liquid has gone syrupy rather than dry.
- Muscatel grapesMuscat table grapes are seeded and intensely perfumed, which is the whole point of the recipe. Any seeded muscat variety works; ordinary seedless red or black grapes will do but give a flatter, less floral juice, so a strip of lemon peel helps.
- "Distilled" waterProbably reflects period anxieties about water purity rather than any culinary necessity; filtered or ordinary tap water is fine. "A very little" is best read as a few tablespoons, just enough to keep the grapes from catching before they release their own juice.
- Extracting the juiceTwo pounds of grapes yields roughly two cups of juice. Crush them against the side of the pan with a wooden spoon as they soften, then strain through a sieve; pressing hard through fine cloth gives a clearer but slightly more tannic result from the skins.
- Prunes have changedPeriod prunes were generally sold dried hard and often unpitted. Modern pitted prunes are sold partly rehydrated and will collapse if stewed as long, so expect roughly 20 to 30 minutes of gentle stewing, and taste for texture rather than watching the clock.
- The alternative methodStewing the two fruits together and skimming the seeds is quicker but never gets them all. If you take that route, use seedless grapes and skip the skimming entirely.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight as a cold dessert. Chill thoroughly, and serve with unsweetened cream, thick yoghurt or a plain custard, which the recipe's ancestors would have called a boiled custard.
Prunes were a staple of the American larder, cheap, long-keeping, and pushed hard by the California growers whose orchards were expanding fast in the 1880s and 1890s. Cookbooks of the period are full of ways to make them palatable, and this one is unusually elegant: instead of sugar syrup it borrows the sweetness and perfume of muscat grapes, a fruit long grown for raisins and for the sweet wine of the same name. The instruction to use distilled water is a small window on anxieties about water quality, common in household writing of the day, when municipal supplies were variable and "pure water" was a selling point for everything from bottled goods to hotels; it may point to a health cookbook of the early twentieth century as easily as to anything earlier. Stewed fruit occupied the place on the American table that a cold pudding or ice would take at a grander dinner, and the note that the trouble is "worth it" suggests the writer knew how low prunes ranked in the affections of readers.