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Jellied Prunes
1/3 lb. prunes 2½ C cold water 2½ T gelatine 1 C sugar ¼ C lemon juice Wash prunes and soak in 2 C of the cold water. Cook in same water until tender. Drain off liquid and reserve. Remove pits from prunes and cut in quarters. Add enough hot water to the liquid to make two cups. Soak gelatine in the 1/2 cup cold water and add to hot juice. Stir well. Add strained lemon juice, sugar and prune pulp. Mold and serve with whipped cream. (May also be served as a salad). 1/2 C cold water
A simple gelatine dessert built on the prune cooking liquid, which does the work of both flavour and colour. The quantities need a little untangling before you start.
- The water, sorted outThe total cold water is 2½ cups: 2 cups to soak and cook the prunes, and the remaining ½ cup to soften the gelatine. The lemon juice is a quarter cup.
- Gelatine2½ tablespoons of loose gelatine is roughly three and a quarter envelopes of modern powdered gelatine, about 23 g. Against 2 cups of liquid that is a firm, sliceable set suited to turning out of a mould; for a softer, spoonable set use about two envelopes.
- Bloom, then dissolveSprinkle the gelatine over the cold water and leave it five minutes until it swells, then stir it into the hot prune liquid off the heat. Gelatine added to boiling liquid, or boiled after dissolving, loses setting strength.
- PrunesToday's packaged pitted prunes are already soft and need no long soak; twenty minutes of gentle simmering in the 2 cups of water is enough, and you skip the pitting. Unpitted dried prunes, which is what the recipe assumes, do want the full soak.
- Setting and unmouldingFour hours in the refrigerator will set it; overnight is safer for a shaped mould. Rinse the mould in cold water first, and dip it briefly in warm water to release.
- YieldRoughly 4 cups of jelly, serving six or so. As the salad version, spoon it into individual moulds or a shallow pan and cut in squares to set on lettuce.
Church and club cookbooks of the early twentieth century are thick with moulded gelatine, and this one sits squarely in that fashion: granulated gelatine had become widely available and comparatively cheap by around the turn of the century, which put a turned-out mould within reach of households that would never have simmered calves' feet. Prunes were a staple dried fruit, keeping all winter and sweet enough to carry a dessert on their own cooking liquor. The parenthetical note that it "may also be served as a salad" is characteristic of the period: a sweetened fruit jelly could appear as pudding with whipped cream or, unchanged, on a leaf of lettuce as the salad course, a habit that persisted in American community cookbooks for decades.