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Prunes à la Vanille
Make a syrup of equal quantities of lemon juice and water, adding ½ pound of sugar for every 1½ gills of water. Bring to a boil, then add a sufficient quantity of California prunes, which have been carefully washed and soaked, and stew very gently until the prunes are tender.
Then remove from the fire, add vanilla extract to flavor, turn into a dish and set aside to cool.
A compote in all but name, built on a syrup that is far more acidic and far sweeter than most modern palates expect. Two things need attention before you start: the gill, and the vanilla.
- Gills to cupsA gill is half a cup, so 1½ gills of water is ¾ cup. With an equal quantity of lemon juice that is 1½ cups of liquid carrying ½ pound of sugar, roughly 1⅛ cups granulated.
- The lemon is not a typo, but it is a lotEqual parts lemon juice and water gives a sharply sour syrup, presumably to offset the sweetness of both sugar and dried fruit. If you want the prunes to taste of prune rather than lemon, cut the juice to a quarter of the water and add a strip of zest instead.
- "A sufficient quantity"For 1½ cups of syrup, about 1 pound of pitted prunes fills the pan without crowding. Prunes swell considerably after soaking, so judge by the soaked fruit, not the dry.
- SoakingModern packaged prunes are sold moist and pliable; an hour in cool water or tea is plenty, where the drier fruit of a century ago wanted overnight. Skip the soak entirely and the fruit will simply drink the syrup and leave the pan dry.
- Stew means barely a trembleAt a real simmer the skins split and the flesh shreds into the syrup. Hold it just below bubbling, uncovered, for 15 to 20 minutes until a prune yields to a spoon but keeps its shape.
- Vanilla off the heatThe recipe has you take the pan off the fire before the extract goes in. Alcohol-based extract loses aroma quickly in a hot syrup, so add it off the heat, about ½ to 1 teaspoon.
- Syrup consistencyIt will look thin while hot and thicken markedly as it cools. Resist boiling it down, or the syrup may turn sticky or crystallise once cold.
- Yield and servingAbout six servings. Serve cold with the syrup spooned over, and cream, plain yogurt or a spoonful of thick custard alongside.
Prunes were a workhorse of cheap dessert cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: dried, cheap, shelf-stable and widely available. The specific call for California prunes places this in the era when California, and the Santa Clara Valley in particular, was rising to prominence in the prune trade at France's expense; the French prune d'Agen is traditionally said to have reached California with Louis Pellier in the 1850s, and prune orcharding there was extensive by 1900. Giving a plain stewed fruit a French title — à la vanille — was a familiar gesture in cookbooks of the period, which borrowed restaurant nomenclature to dignify inexpensive material. The vanilla extract fits the same picture: a bottled flavouring, by then commercially produced and relatively cheap, doing the work that a whole bean or a proper custard would once have done.