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Prune Butter
10 Prunes 2 Teaspoons Lemon Juice 1 Tablespoon Corn Syrup 1/8 Cup Nut Meats 1/8 Teaspoon Salt Soak the prunes in water for a few hours before cooking. Cook slowly until very tender. Sweeten with corn syrup just before removing from the fire. Remove stones; rub prunes through coarse sieve; add lemon juice, salt and chopped nut meats. (Makes 3/4 cup-enough for 15 large, or 30 small sandwiches.)
A sandwich filling rather than a preserve, despite its place among the jellies. Everything here scales cleanly, but the prunes you buy now are not the prunes this was written for.
- Prunes have changedEarly-century prunes were hard, dry and stone-in, which is why they need hours of soaking and slow cooking. Modern pitted, moisture-infused prunes are soft out of the bag: an hour's soak and 10-15 minutes of gentle simmering is enough to break them down.
- "Remove stones"Assumes unpitted fruit. If you buy pitted prunes, skip that step; still sieve, as that step is for the skins and the texture rather than the stones.
- Small measures1/8 cup of nut meats is 2 tablespoons. "Nut meats" simply means shelled nuts; the recipe does not say which. Chop them fine or they will tear the bread.
- Corn syrupOne tablespoon of corn syrup in ten prunes is a light sweetening, and adds gloss and softness as well. Honey or a little sugar syrup does the same job if you would rather not keep corn syrup.
- "Removing from the fire"Off the heat. Add the syrup at the end so it does not cook down and stiffen the mixture.
- Sieve or notA coarse sieve gives the slightly rough texture intended here. A food processor will give you a smooth paste, which spreads more easily but loses the character; pulse rather than purée if you want a middle course.
- The yield claimThree-quarters of a cup across 15 large sandwiches works out to about a tablespoon each, which is a thin scrape by current habits. Expect closer to 8 sandwiches if you spread it generously.
- Keeping itThis is not a canned preserve and contains no preserving quantity of sugar. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within about a week.
Fruit butters were the thrifty end of the preserving shelf: fruit cooked down and sieved, sweetened lightly, with no pectin and no attempt at a set. Prune butter belongs to the same family as the Central European lekvar, a plum butter that travelled with Hungarian, Polish and Jewish immigration, though this version, with its corn syrup and chopped nuts, is thoroughly domesticated. It sits within the sandwich-filling vogue of the early twentieth century, when women's magazines and manufacturers' pamphlets promoted dozens of spreads for tea sandwiches, club lunches and packed school dinners. California growers were also promoting the prune in this period as an everyday fruit, and a cheap recipe aimed at the new housekeeper fits that effort.