Home › Pudding Recipes › Prune Pudding
Prune Pudding
1 tablespoonful cornstarch 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 eggs 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) sugar 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) currants I inch cinnamon stick 1 wineglassful port wine Wash the prunes and stew them gently with sufficient water to cover, adding also the sugar, cinnamon, lemon rind, and strained juice. When tender, remove the cinnamon and lemon rind; stone the prunes and rub them through a sieve. Crack half of the moving the stones. Put them into a casserole with two tablespoonfuls of the sugar and the water.
Simmer till tender.
Put the sponge cake into an earthenware dish, lay the apricots on them. Beat up the eggs with the rest of the sugar, add the cream to them, then pour them into a double boiler. Stir over the fire till quite smooth, then add the rum.
Pour this over the apricots and serve hot.
This page has come out of the press badly damaged, and what survives is not one recipe but the wreckage of two. Read it as a curiosity rather than a set of instructions.
- The text collides mid-sentenceThe method begins with prunes, cinnamon, lemon and port, then breaks at "Crack half of the moving the stones" and continues into an entirely different dish of apricots, sponge cake, cream and rum. Neither half is complete: the prune pudding never reaches an oven or a mould, and the apricot dish has no ingredient list of its own.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list heads with cornstarch, milk, eggs, sugar, currants, cinnamon and port, yet names no prunes at all, and no lemon, cream, sponge cake, apricots or rum. There is no honest way to reconstruct the amounts, and guessing at them would be invention rather than translation.
- Cracked stonesThe line survives only as "Crack half of the moving the stones", but it most likely reflects the old direction to split some of the fruit pits and add the kernels for an almond note. Prune and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide on digestion; apricot kernels in particular have been the subject of modern food-safety warnings. That, together with the fact that the text is unusable, is reason enough not to attempt it.
- Casserole means the panA casserole here is an earthenware or fireproof pot rather than a baked dish. "Put them into a casserole with two tablespoonfuls of the sugar and the water. Simmer till tender" is a direction for gentle stewing in the pot.
- A wineglassfulIn period cookery writing a wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. A gill, which appears elsewhere in books of this type, is half a cup.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not the fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants of a garden.
- If you want the dishA current recipe for a baked prune or apricot custard pudding will give you the same result with quantities that add up. Use one.
Prune puddings were a fixture of British and American household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when dried fruit was the cheap, storable sweetener of the winter larder. Stewing prunes with sugar, a stick of cinnamon and lemon peel, then sieving the pulp into eggs and milk, produced a thrifty custard-set pudding that could be dressed up with a wineglass of port for company. The cracked kernel is the older habit visible here: some cooks split a few stones and added the bitter kernels for an almond flavour, a practice found across European fruit cookery and one that persisted after chemists had identified the cyanogenic glycoside responsible.