Home › Cold Desserts › Norwegian Prune Pudding
Norwegian Prune Pudding
½ lb. prunes = 22 prunes 2 cups cold water 1 cup sugar 1 inch piece stick cinnamon 1⅓ cups boiling water 1/3 cup corn-starch 1 tablespoon lemon juice Pick over and wash prunes, then soak one hour in cold water, and boil until soft in same water. Obtain meat from stones and add to prunes and water; then add sugar, cinnamon, boiling water, and simmer ten minutes. Dilute cornstarch with enough cold water to pour easily, add to prune mixture, and cook five minutes. Remove cinnamon, add lemon juice, mould, then chill, and serve with cream.
Nut Prune Soufflé Follow recipe for Norwegian Prune Pudding, then add whites two eggs beaten stiff and one-half cup walnut meats broken in pieces.
A Scandinavian-style thickened fruit pudding of the sort that filled the cold-dessert chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. One instruction in it is genuinely dangerous, and a second raises a lesser concern.
- The kernels are the problem"Obtain meat from stones and add to prunes" means cracking the pits and eating the almond-shaped seed inside. Plum kernels, like bitter almonds and apricot kernels, contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the seed is crushed and wetted. The amount contributed by the kernels of 22 prunes is not known precisely, and cooking cannot be relied on to drive off the cyanide in a thickened mixture. Use a current prune pudding recipe instead.
- Why the period cook did itThe kernel was valued for its bitter-almond flavour, the same reason ratafia and noyau were made from stone-fruit pits. Cookbooks of this kind generally treat the kernel as a free flavouring rather than a hazard.
- The soufflé variation adds raw eggThe souffle variation adds raw egg -- Stiff-beaten whites are folded into the pudding and then moulded and chilled, so they cannot be relied on to reach a safe temperature. That is a separate risk from the kernels and applies even if the stones are discarded.
- 11½ cups boiling waterA typographical corruption. The proportions only work at 1½ cups; 11½ cups against 1/3 cup cornstarch would never set. This is worth knowing if you are reading the page as a document rather than cooking from it.
- 1½ lb. prunes = 22 prunes1 1/2 lb. prunes = 22 prunes -- a large fruit by modern grading, though the period weight includes the stones. Today's pitted dried prunes run roughly 40-50 to the pound, so the equivalence suggests jumbo whole prunes, sold unpitted as prunes usually were.
- Mould and serve with cream"Mould" means turning the mixture into a wetted bowl or shape and chilling until firm, not baking.
This is a naturalised version of the Scandinavian sviskegrøt or sødsuppe family: dried fruit stewed with sugar and a stick of cinnamon, thickened with starch, chilled and eaten cold with cream. Potato starch was the usual thickener in Norway and Denmark; American books substitute cornstarch, which was widely available by the 1890s. Prunes appear often in cookbooks of this period as a cheap dried fruit available year-round, and were credited with mild medicinal virtue, which made them respectable for invalid and children's cookery as well as dessert. The instruction to crack the stones and use the kernels appears in other books of the period as well; the cyanogenic content of stone-fruit seeds does not seem to have been treated as a domestic concern in this literature.