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Stewed California Prunes or Figs
(Black) Wash the figs or prunes well in two waters, put in a saucepan and completely cover with water (preferably distilled). Stew gently until nearly all the water is absorbed and the fruit is plump. Do not use any sugar. Cooked in this way the flavor is preserved, and the fruit is very nourishing. I never soak prunes.
A method rather than a formula: no sugar, no soaking, and just enough water to plump the fruit as it cooks down. It works, but modern dried fruit behaves differently from what the writer had.
- The hinge: barely any liquid leftThe point of the method is that the fruit reabsorbs its own cooking liquid, so the sugars and flavor stay in the prunes instead of leaching into a thin syrup. Stop when the pan is nearly dry and the fruit is swollen and glossy, not when it is swimming.
- TimingThe original gives none. Unsoaked pitted prunes at a bare simmer need roughly 20-30 minutes; whole prunes with stones, or hard dried figs, closer to 40-45. Keep it at a lazy bubble, since a hard boil bursts the skins and turns the fruit to mush.
- Today's dried fruit is wetterSupermarket prunes are generally sold partly rehydrated, and many are treated with a preservative such as potassium sorbate, so they plump faster than the leathery 1900s article. Check at 15 minutes and add hot water only if the pan threatens to dry out before the fruit is soft.
- Why distilled waterHard water was widely blamed at the time for toughening dried fruit skins, which is the likely reason for the parenthesis; the recipe itself gives no explanation. Filtered or ordinary tap water is fine.
- "I never soak prunes"An aside aimed at the then-common advice to soak dried fruit overnight. Cooking straight from dry keeps the flavour in the fruit, which is the writer's stated point.
- No sugarTake this seriously rather than correcting it. Prunes are about 40 percent sugar by weight, and the reduction concentrates it further. If the fruit tastes flat, a strip of lemon peel or a split vanilla pod in the pan does more than sweetening.
- Yield and servingOne pound of dried fruit will give roughly six servings. The fruit keeps about a week covered in the refrigerator. Cream, custard or plain yogurt are the usual accompaniments.
- "(Black)"Most likely a contributor's name, if the book marks reader-submitted recipes; a reference to black figs cannot be ruled out from the text alone.
California dried fruit was a national commodity by the time this book appeared, and its promoters worked hard to sell prunes as a health food rather than a cheap filler. The prune of the California trade was the French prune d'Agen, whose introduction to the Santa Clara Valley in the 1850s is generally credited to the nurseryman Louis Pellier; figs came from Mission trees planted by the Spanish missions and, later, from Smyrna stock marketed as Calimyrna. The insistence on no sugar, distilled water and no soaking places this recipe squarely in the food-reform current of the period, when prunes were prescribed as much for digestion as for pleasure, and when sugar was suspected of masking the "natural" virtue of a fruit. The claim that the fruit is "very nourishing" belongs to that same current.