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Prune Soufflé
12 large prunes
3 egg-whites
3 tablespoons powdered sugar
Soak prunes overnight and stew in the same water until tender. Remove stones and mash to a smooth pulp. Beat the egg-whites until stiff, fold in the sugar and then the prune pulp. Turn into a greased baking -dish and bake in a slow oven (300° F.) about twenty minutes. Serve at once with cream, soft custard or any desired sauce.
A featherweight steamed-fruit meringue of the kind that filled the invalid-cookery and light-dessert pages of early twentieth-century books. It is essentially prune purée lightened with beaten whites, and it stands or falls on how dry the purée is.
- PrunesTwelve large prunes yield roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of pulp. Modern pitted prunes are sold already softened and will usually need only a short soak and a brief simmer rather than an overnight one.
- Drain the pulp hardThe hinge of the dish. Any free stewing liquid left in the purée will deflate the whites and give a wet, sunken soufflé. Mash the fruit thick enough to hold a shape on the spoon, and let it cool to room temperature before it meets the egg.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and dissolves well into whites.
- Folding orderSugar into the stiff whites first, then the pulp in two or three additions, cutting rather than stirring. Overworking at this stage is the usual cause of a flat result.
- The oven300°F is genuinely what the recipe wants — this is a soufflé set gently rather than driven up fast. Twenty minutes suits a shallow dish; a deeper one will likely need longer. It is done when the top is set and lightly coloured and the centre only just trembles.
- Serve at onceNo exaggeration here. A meringue-based soufflé with no starch or yolk to stabilise it begins collapsing within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- YieldThree or four small servings. Doubling works, but bake in two dishes rather than one deep one.
Prune soufflés and prune whips appear across American cookbooks of the 1890s through the 1920s with remarkable consistency, and the reason is partly commercial: California prune orchards were producing on a large scale by the 1890s, and dried prunes were cheap, shelf-stable and heavily promoted. They were also firmly associated with health and digestion, which made them a fixture of sickroom and light-dessert cookery — a dish of fruit and egg white with no butter, flour or yolk was exactly what convalescent diets of the era called for.