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Prunes
Wash the prunes in cold water; cover with fresh water and allow to soak over night. Simmer for five minutes in the same water in which they were soaked; add sugar to taste and when sugar is dissolved and the prunes boiling hot, place in the cooker for four hours.
A fireless cooker recipe: the fruit is brought fully to the boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box to finish on stored heat. Everything depends on the prunes being genuinely boiling hot when they go in.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated wooden or metal chest, often with soapstone or iron radiants heated on the range, that held a pot near simmering for hours without fuel. The modern equivalents are a slow cooker on low, a wide-mouth vacuum flask, or a heavy covered pot wrapped in towels inside a cooler.
- The hinge: boiling hot in, lid on fastThe cooker adds no heat; it only slows the loss of what you put in. If the prunes go in merely warm they will simply cool over the four hours instead of cooking. Bring them to a full rolling boil, then move pot and all into the insulation immediately and do not open it.
- Four hours is for the prunes of 1900Four hours suits fully dried fruit -- The prunes this recipe assumes were hard, fully dried fruit. Modern "pitted prunes" are partially rehydrated and sold moist, so overnight soaking plus 20-30 minutes of gentle simmering, or about an hour in a slow cooker, should give soft fruit and syrup; four hours is likely to leave them very soft indeed.
- Keep the soaking waterThe instruction is deliberate. Sugars and soluble solids leach out overnight, and that liquid becomes the syrup. Discarding it costs you both flavour and body.
- Sugar to tastePrunes carry a great deal of their own sugar. Start with 2 tablespoons per pound of fruit and add more only after tasting; add it after the initial simmer as written, since sugar added early slows the softening of the skins.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. One pound of dried prunes with about 3 cups of water yields roughly 4 cups of stewed fruit with syrup, enough for six as a breakfast dish or a spooned dessert.
- A strip of lemon or a cinnamon stickPeriod cookbooks often add one or the other to stewed prunes. Either goes in with the sugar and can be lifted out before serving.
Fireless cookery was a serious domestic movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, promoted for fuel economy, for keeping kitchens cool in summer, and for freeing the cook from watching a coal range. Books of the period carried whole sections of dishes adapted to the insulated cooker, and dried fruit was ideal for it: cheap, shelf-stable, forgiving of long slow heat, and needing no attention. Stewed prunes themselves were a fixture of the American breakfast table well into the mid-century, valued as much for their reputed effect on the digestion as for their taste.