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Casserole of Prunes
1 pound of prunes 1/4 ounce vegetable gelatine 3/4 pound of lump sugar 1 pint of water Wash the prunes thoroughly, and cook them for three-quarters of an hour in the water. Drain them through a sieve, and carefully remove the stones without breaking the fruit more than is necessary. Take out the kernels and put in each prune. Put the water that the prunes were cooked in into a clean saucepan, with the sugar, and boil for thirty minutes; then add the prunes, and let it simmer for fifteen minutes. Soak the gelatine in a little cold water for an hour before using it; add it to the prunes when they have simmered fifteen minutes, and stir gently until dissolved. Rinse out a mold with cold water, fill it, and let it stand until next day. Serve with whipped cream.
PRUNE FLUFF 1 1/2 pounds dried prunes 3/4 cup whipping cream Wash the prunes, and put in boiling water for a few minutes. Drain, and soak in sufficient cold water to cover for twenty-four to thirty-six hours or until the prunes are soft. Drain off the liquid. Remove the stones, and pass the prunes through a colander. This quantity should make three cups of pulp. Whip the cream, and fold into the prune pulp. Serve in stemmed sherbet glasses.
Two prune desserts share this page. The first turns on an instruction that no modern cook should follow: cracking the stones and returning the kernels to the fruit.
- The kernels are the problemPlum and prune stones contain a kernel rich in amygdalin, the same cyanogenic glycoside that makes bitter almonds dangerous. A pound of prunes yields roughly thirty to forty kernels, and this recipe puts one inside every piece of fruit, to be eaten whole. Fifteen minutes of simmering in syrup does not remove the glycoside; it is hydrolysed to hydrogen cyanide in the gut. Use a current recipe for stuffed or moulded prunes instead.
- Why the older book thought it reasonableThe kernel was valued as a free source of almond flavour, in the same spirit as the bitter-almond flavourings and noyau liqueurs of the period. Those uses relied on tiny quantities dissolved through a whole dish, not on a whole kernel per serving.
- Vegetable gelatineThis most likely means agar-agar, made from seaweed and sold to vegetarian households as a substitute for animal gelatine. A quarter ounce is about 7 g. Agar behaves differently from gelatine: it needs a full boil to dissolve, and the recipe's cold soak followed by stirring into simmering fruit may not disperse it completely; it also sets firm at room temperature rather than needing a night in the cold.
- Lump sugar and the syrupThree-quarters of a pound of lump sugar is roughly 1 3/4 cups of granulated. Boiling it with a pint of prune liquor for thirty minutes reduces it to a heavy syrup; the sweetness is far beyond current taste for a fruit dessert.
- The pintIf this were a British text the pint would be 20 fl oz, not 16, though the cup measures and 'sherbet glasses' of the second recipe point to an American book. Either way the liquid is boiled down to syrup, so a smaller pint will thicken faster and may catch.
- Prune Fluff: the long soakA twenty-four to thirty-six hour soak at room temperature was written for hard, heavily dried fruit. Modern pitted prunes are sold moist and soften in an hour of hot soaking. Left standing two days in water at kitchen temperature, sweet fruit will begin to ferment.
- Passing through a colanderA colander here means forcing the softened fruit through with a wooden spoon, the period equivalent of a food mill or sieve. A blender or processor gives the three cups of smooth pulp the recipe expects in seconds.
- YieldPrune Fluff should make about six sherbet glasses; the pulp is dense, so smaller servings are better than large. The mould would serve six to eight, though neither recipe gives a yield.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the wave of vegetarian and reform cookbooks published in English on both sides of the Atlantic in the early twentieth century, when meat abstention was argued on grounds of health, economy and religion at once. Prunes are everywhere in these books: cheap, shelf-stable, valued as a mild laxative in an era preoccupied with digestion, and available in quantity from a California drying industry that had grown large by the 1890s. The "vegetable gelatine" of the first recipe is agar-agar, long used in Japanese and Chinese kitchens and taken up by Western vegetarian cooks precisely because ordinary gelatine is rendered from bones and hides — a moulded dessert was one of the harder things to reproduce without animal products. The instruction to eat the kernels reflects a widespread older habit of treating the stone's inner seed as a bonus almond flavouring; it appears in period jam and conserve recipes as well, and is one of the clearest cases of a practice that later toxicology retired.