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Prune Almond Filling
To White Mountain Cream (see p. 528) add one-half cup selected prunes, stoned and cut in pieces, and one-third cup almonds blanched and chopped.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made White Mountain Cream, the book's boiled-syrup frosting. The additions are simple, but the timing of when they go in decides whether the frosting sets or slumps.
- What White Mountain Cream isA boiled icing: sugar syrup cooked until it threads from the tip of the spoon, beaten in a thin stream into stiffly beaten egg whites and whipped until it holds its shape. Everything below depends on having that base ready and still soft enough to spread.
- Fold the fruit in lastThe original does not say when to add them; in practice, add the prunes and almonds after the frosting has been beaten thick and is nearly cool. Stirred in early, moisture from the fruit can thin the meringue and leave it slack.
- Dry the prunes"Selected" was a trade description for plump, high-grade dried plums. Whatever you start with, blot the cut pieces thoroughly on a towel; surface syrup is what breaks a boiled icing.
- StonedMeans pitted. Pitted prunes are standard now, but check them by hand, since a stone fragment in a soft filling is easy to miss.
- Blanching almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute, drain, and slip the skins off between finger and thumb. Dry them well and chop fine; toasting them first is not in the original but adds a good deal.
- MeasuresHalf a cup of cut prunes is about 3 oz, a third cup of chopped almonds about 1.5 oz. Farmer's cups are the modern 8 fl oz cup, so no conversion is needed.
- Yield and useThe original gives no yield. A single batch of the base with these additions makes a modest quantity, enough to fill and thinly cover a small layer cake. Spread it while it is still workable, as boiled icing crusts as it cools.
- Egg whitesThe hot syrup heats the whites but does not reliably pasteurize them. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized whites or powdered egg white in the base.
Boiled or "White Mountain" icing was widely used in late nineteenth-century American baking, and Fannie Farmer's book treats it as a platform, with a run of variations built on the plain version. Prunes and almonds together belonged to a period when California dried fruit had become cheap and widely shipped, and when prunes carried none of the comic weight they later acquired; they were simply a good, sweet, inexpensive dried fruit that kept in a jar all winter. The pairing with almonds is unsurprising, since both were California crops. The variation method may also suggest something about the cookbook's approach at the Boston Cooking School, though that is a matter of interpretation rather than anything the page states.