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Plums in Batter

Make a batter with five tablespoons of flour, rather more than a pint of milk, and two eggs. Remove the stones from one pound of large plums, crack them, put the kernels inside of the plums and stir the plums in the batter with two tablespoons of moist sugar. Bake in a hot oven for about three-fourths of an hour. Sprinkle powdered sugar over the top and serve hot.-M. F. Snider.

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a clafoutis-style baked batter pudding, and the batter itself is unremarkable. The problem is the instruction to crack the stones and bake the kernels inside the fruit.

The kernels are the hazardPlum stones enclose a soft kernel containing amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. When the kernel is crushed or chewed, enzymes convert it to hydrogen cyanide; this is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds dangerous and sweet almonds harmless.
Baking does not make them safeHeat degrades some amygdalin but three-quarters of an hour in a domestic oven, inside whole fruit surrounded by wet batter, is nowhere near enough to be relied on. The kernels also stay whole and are eaten intact rather than being steeped and strained out, as they were in noyau and other kernel cordials.
Quantity is not trivialA pound of large plums is perhaps six to ten stones, and the recipe puts every kernel back into the dish. There is no stated portion size, so a single serving could carry several kernels. Children are at particular risk because the dose that matters scales with body weight.
No safe substitution is impliedUse a current baked plum pudding or clafoutis recipe rather than adapting this one. Kernel flavour in modern cooking comes from almond extract or a drop of amaretto, both commercial products subject to limits on cyanide content.
Reading the rest of itFor context only: "moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, "powdered sugar" here means finely ground white sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch, and a "hot oven" in this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F, though the term was never standardised — and three-quarters of an hour at that heat suggests the writer meant something closer to moderate.

A Little History

Cracking fruit stones for the kernel is an old European kitchen habit, traceable through ratafia biscuits, noyau cordials and the classic French practice of leaving the pits in a cherry clafoutis for their faint bitter-almond perfume. Nineteenth-century cooks used apricot, peach and plum kernels much as they used bitter almonds, and household books of the 1880s and 1890s pass the technique along without comment because the flavour was familiar. The signed attribution — "M. F. Snider" — marks this as a reader contribution.

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2026 Editor's Note: This historic recipe's instruction to crack plum stones and bake thekernelsinside the fruit is dangerous. Plum, apricot, and peach kernels containamygdalin, a cyanogenic glycosidethat can release hydrogen cyanide when chewed or digested, and bakingdoes not reliably make them safe. The recipe uses the kernels from roughly six to ten plums in one dish, potentially concentrating a harmful dose in a single serving. Modern recipes achieve a similar bitter-almond flavor safely throughalmond extract or a drop of amaretto,which are commercially regulated for cyanide content. No modern plum variety, including the European (Prunus domestica) and Japanese (Prunus salicina) types commonly grown today, is known to eliminate this risk;the fruit itself is safe, but the stones are not. Readers who want a similar baked fruit dessert should follow a contemporaryplum torte or clafoutisrecipe instead of attempting to adapt this historical method, and the original recipe belongs only in a food-history collection with an explicit warning. (Ed: DS 2026-08-12)

Plums in Batter

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