Prune Jelly
2 tablespoons lemon juice Cook prunes and remove stones. Soak gelatine in cold 2 tablespoons sherry 2 cups boiling water 1 cup sugar cup walnuts water. Add boiling water. Strain; add lemon juice, sherry and sugar. Pour into a mold. When mixture begins to harden, add prunes cut in pieces and walnuts broken in pieces. Stir occasionally, to keep fruit from settling. Mold, chill, and serve with soft custard.
The ingredient list in this printing has collapsed into the method, and two key quantities — the prunes and the gelatine — are lost. Everything else is workable, but you will need to supply those.
- Missing quantitiesThe original gives no weight for the prunes and no amount for the gelatine. For the volume of liquid here (2 cups boiling water, 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 tablespoons sherry), jelly recipes of this period commonly called for about two tablespoons of granulated gelatine, roughly two envelopes of the modern unflavoured kind. Treat the prune quantity as cook's discretion — half a pound to a pound of dried prunes gives enough fruit for this mold.
- "Cup walnuts"Another casualty of the typesetting: the amount before "cup walnuts" has dropped out, and there is no telling whether it was a fraction or a whole number. A half cup of broken walnut meats suits the amount of jelly here.
- Soaking the gelatineGranulated gelatine of the period needed a genuine cold soak, five minutes or so in a few tablespoons of cold water, before the boiling water went in. Skipping it leaves undissolved grains that show up as gritty threads in the finished jelly.
- The hinge: when to add the fruitWait until the jelly has thickened to the consistency of raw egg white before stirring in prunes and nuts. Add them to warm liquid and the prunes sink, the walnuts float, and you get a striped mold instead of an even one. The instruction to stir occasionally is doing real work.
- PrunesCook the dried prunes in water until plump and tender, then pit them. Modern pitted prunes are softer and need only a brief simmer; drain them well, since extra liquid slackens the set.
- StrainingStrain the dissolved gelatine before the flavourings go in, as directed — it catches any undissolved grains.
- UnmoldingRinse the mold with cold water before filling. To turn it out, dip briefly in hot water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Yield and servingHard to fix exactly, since the prune quantity is missing; something on the order of a quart, serving six or so. The soft custard called for is a stirred boiled custard.
- The sherryTwo tablespoons go in uncooked and stay uncooked. Leave it out and increase the lemon juice slightly if that matters to you; the jelly is sweet enough to need the acid.
Prune jelly belongs to the great age of the molded dessert, when commercially packaged granulated gelatine turned a dish that had once required hours of simmering calves' feet into an afternoon's work. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full complement of ordinary household dessert formulas so the book would earn its keep on the kitchen shelf. Dried prunes were then a cheap, year-round, shelf-stable fruit — California's prune industry was expanding rapidly in the 1890s and 1900s — which made them a standard filling for jellies, whips and souffles in months when fresh fruit was scarce or costly. The recipe calls for sherry and is served with a soft custard.