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Prune Pudding
One pound of prunes, one-half pound of walnuts or almonds, the whites of four eggs, one cupful of sugar, whipped cream; flavor to taste. Stew prunes and when cold remove stones, then chop fine, also chop nuts and put in dish with sugar and well-beaten whites of eggs. Whip cream, flavor, and spread on top.
This is a prune whip of the uncooked kind: stewed fruit and nuts folded into raw beaten egg whites and topped with whipped cream, served without ever going near heat. That is the problem with it.
- The egg whites are never cookedNothing in this recipe brings the whites of four eggs to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The prunes are stewed and then cooled before the whites go in, and the finished dish is spread with cream and served. Shell eggs of the period were a different risk picture from today's; a current recipe for prune whip, one that bakes the mixture or uses a cooked meringue, should be used instead.
- Why some prune whips were bakedMany contemporary versions of the same dish direct the cook to pile the mixture into a buttered dish and bake it in a moderate oven until set, which is what makes them a pudding rather than a raw foam. This one omits that step entirely, and the omission is the whole difficulty.
- A pound of prunesDried prunes of the period were sold with the stones in, hence the instruction to remove them after stewing.
- "Flavor to taste"The likely flavourings for a dish of this sort are vanilla, sherry or a little lemon in the whipped cream. The recipe does not specify.
- Walnuts or almondsEither was chopped rather than ground; the point is texture against the soft fruit. Almonds here would be sweet almonds.
Prune whip belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American desserts built on beaten egg white and a stiff fruit puree — apple snow, apricot whip, prune souffle — light, pale, inexpensive sweets that looked far grander than their cost, and their spread coincided with the growing availability of cheap dried California prunes. Books aimed at new housekeepers leaned on them: a pound of prunes, some nuts and four eggs made a company dessert out of pantry staples, and the whipped cream on top did the work of a sauce. The dish survived well into the twentieth century, often in a baked form, which sets the whites and lets it be turned out and cut. This unbaked version is the simpler idea, closer to a fruit snow than a pudding.