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Prune Pudding
1/2 lb. prunes. 4 egg whites. 4 T sugar Soak prunes in cold water over night. Boil until soft and juice is thick. Remove pits and mash fine. Add prune pulp to egg whites and sugar and beat well. Put in pudding pan and set pan in boiling water in slow oven and slowly increase heat. Bake 30 minutes. Serve with cream. 1 lb. dried apricots Clara Osborne.
A baked fruit-and-meringue pudding, set down in the compressed style typical of church cookbooks, where the ingredient list has been mangled in typesetting. Read the method first and reconstruct the quantities before you start.
- The garbled ingredient listOnly "4 T sugar" (4 tablespoons) survives in usable form, and the stray "1 lb. dried apricots" at the end almost certainly belongs to the recipe printed alongside it. No quantity of prunes or egg whites is given anywhere; this is a genuine gap, not something to guess at from the text.
- Working proportionsPuddings of this type in contemporary books run to roughly 1 cup of thick prune pulp beaten into the stiffly whipped whites of 4 to 6 eggs with the 4 tablespoons of sugar. That is a reconstruction from the family of recipes, not from this page.
- Soaking and boilingModern dried prunes are sold moist-pack and pitted, and rarely need an overnight soak. An hour in water, then a gentle simmer until they collapse and the liquid reduces to a syrup, gets you to the same place.
- "Slow oven"Around 300F. The instruction to "slowly increase heat" may reflect a solid-fuel range coming up to heat during baking; in a modern oven, start at 300F and raise to 325F for the last ten minutes if the top has not set.
- The water bathSet the pudding dish in a larger pan and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the sides. The gentle, even heat is what keeps a whipped-white mixture from souffleing up and then collapsing into rubber.
- Folding, not beatingThe original says "beat well," but the pulp should be folded into whites already whipped to soft-firm peaks. Beating the two together deflates the foam and you lose the light texture the dish depends on.
- DonenessThirty minutes at 300F is about right for a shallow dish. It is done when the surface is dry to a light touch and a knife inserted at the edge comes out clean; the centre may still wobble slightly and will firm as it cools.
- Yield and servingOn the reconstructed quantities above, enough for about six small servings. "Serve with cream" means plain unwhipped pouring cream, cold, over a pudding that has been allowed to settle for ten minutes out of the oven. It sinks quickly, so it is not a dish to hold.
Prune whips and prune puddings were widespread in American cookery between about 1890 and 1930, and their popularity had as much to do with economy and dietetics as with taste: dried prunes kept well in a pantry, cost little, were shipped east from California orchards in quantity, and were widely promoted as a wholesome laxative food at a time when domestic-science writers took a keen interest in such matters. A dessert built on fruit pulp and egg whites, with four tablespoons of sugar and no butter or flour at all, was the sort of thing recommended for invalids and children. Community cookbooks of this kind, compiled from members' contributed recipes and set in tight columns, are prone to exactly the kind of scrambling seen here, where one contributor's ingredient line strays into her neighbour's method.