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Military Prunes
Take some of the best French preserved prunes, and remove the stones. Soak them in orange curacoa for as long a time as you have at your disposal. Then replace each stone by a blanched almond, and place the prunes in small crystal dishes.
A three-ingredient sweetmeat that stands or falls on the quality of the prunes. Nothing is cooked, so everything depends on what you buy and how long you can wait.
- "French preserved prunes""French preserved prunes" most likely means pruneaux d'Agen — large, semi-dried Ente plums, sold soft and glossy rather than leathery — though the book does not say so. Ordinary supermarket pitted prunes will work but collapse more readily; look for whole prunes with stones in, which hold their shape when you open them out.
- Orange curacoaCuraçao, an orange liqueur made with bitter orange peel. Grand Marnier or Cointreau are the usual substitutes; a dry orange curaçao is probably closest to the period product. Allow roughly 1/2 cup of liqueur per 20 prunes in a small jar, adding more if they are not covered.
- How long to soak"As long a time as you have at your disposal" leaves it open — the recipe accepts a short soak, but overnight, and up to a week in a sealed jar in the fridge, will do more. A brief soak wets little more than the skin; over a day or two the liqueur works further in and the prunes swell.
- Stoning without splittingSlit each prune along one side with a paring knife and lever the stone out rather than pushing it through. The pocket left behind should close over the almond so the fruit still looks whole.
- Blanched almondsWhole sweet almonds with the skins slipped off — 30 seconds in boiling water, then pinch. Already-blanched whole almonds are fine; toasting them lightly is optional and a matter of taste, not something the recipe calls for. Do not use bitter almonds, which older confectionery books sometimes call for.
- Crystal dishesSmall footed glass dishes or bonbon dishes, served at the end of dinner with coffee. Paper petits-fours cases on a plate do the same job.
- Yield and keepingFigure two or three per person as an after-dinner sweet; a pound of prunes serves about a dozen. Stuffed and returned to the jar with the soaking liqueur they keep for weeks in the fridge, though the almonds soften after a few days.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it sits oddly between two worlds: a country under occupation and a household kitchen still capable of luxuries like curaçao and crystal dishes. Stuffed prunes of this kind belong to the French and Belgian tradition of fruits déguisés, or stuffed fruit, the almond standing in for the stone being the standard trick — the same idea appears in prunes stuffed with marzipan or with a second prune's flesh. The name is unexplained in the book; "military" was attached freely to all manner of things in 1915, and one suspects a wartime joke about a stone being relieved by a fresh recruit, though that reading is guesswork rather than documented.