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Prune Cocktail
Cook choice prunes just enough to remove the stones easily. Sweeten slightly while cooking.
Chill thoroughly and chop into small pieces. To the juice add strained orange and lemon juice to taste and serve cold.
A Depression-era fruit starter that stretches dried fruit with citrus. It is barely a formula, so the useful work is in the proportions and the texture.
- "Cocktail" here means a first courseIn this period a fruit cocktail was served in a stemmed glass at the start of a meal, not as pudding, and the sharp citrus finish makes more sense before food than after.
- Cooking the prunesCover dried prunes with water and simmer 15-20 minutes, or soak overnight and simmer 10. Stop as soon as the stones slip out; pushed further the flesh collapses and you lose the chopped texture the recipe wants. Pitted prunes shorten the job to a brief soak.
- "Sweeten slightly"About a tablespoon of sugar per cup of prunes is enough. Prunes are already high in sugar, and the orange juice adds more.
- Save all the cooking liquidThe juice is the drink; do not drain it away. Use only as much water as covers the prunes, so that what is left is syrup rather than a thin liquid.
- Proportions for the juiceStart with equal parts prune liquid and fresh orange juice, then add lemon a teaspoon at a time. Prune syrup is heavy and flat on its own, and the lemon is what keeps it from tasting like stewed fruit.
- Chill properlyCold is doing real work here, both for the syrup and for firming the fruit before you chop it. Several hours in the refrigerator, or overnight.
- Yield and servingA pound of prunes with the juices should give roughly six to eight small glasses. Divide the chopped fruit between the glasses, pour the juice over, and serve with a spoon rather than a straw.
Prunes were the workhorse dried fruit of the American pantry: cheap, shelf-stable, shipped in bulk from California orchards, and available year-round when fresh fruit was neither. Recipes like this one belong to a genre of thrift cookery that borrowed the vocabulary of the restaurant menu, where a "cocktail" of oysters, shrimp or fresh fruit opened a formal dinner, and applied it to whatever was in the cupboard. The orange and lemon do the social work, lifting a stewed dried fruit into something that could plausibly be served in a stemmed glass. Prunes also carried a reputation as a health food, promoted for iron and for regularity.