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STEWED PRUNES (Look over the prunes carefully)
Look over the prunes carefully, wash, cover with cold water and let stand over night. The next morning turn them into the kettle of the fireless cooker and boil five minutes, using the same water in which they were soaked. Sweeten and place in the fireless cooker for six hours.
A fireless cooker is a well-insulated box: food is brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in to finish on its own retained heat. Prunes are forgiving enough that the method translates directly to a slow cooker, a low oven, or a heavy pot left covered off the heat.
- The soaking water is the pointBoiling and stewing in the overnight soaking liquid keeps the sugars and the dark, faintly smoky flavor that leaches out of the fruit. Draining it and starting fresh gives a thinner, blander syrup.
- What the six hours are doingIn a fireless cooker the kettle is simply coasting down from boiling, so nothing scorches and nothing reduces. A modern equivalent is a slow cooker on low for 3 to 4 hours, or a covered pot in a 200-225F oven for the same, checking that the liquid still covers the fruit.
- If you skip the overnight soakModern packaged prunes are sold much moister than the hard, heavily dried fruit of the period. An hour's soak, or none at all, plus 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering will bring them to the same point.
- Sweeten with restraintThe original gives no quantity. Start with about 2 tablespoons sugar or honey per pound of prunes, added after the first boil as directed, and taste once the fruit has softened; oversweetening flattens the tartness that makes stewed prunes worth eating.
- Quantities and yieldA pound of prunes with water to cover, roughly 3 cups, gives about 4 to 6 servings and a cup or so of syrup.
- Worth addingA strip of lemon peel, a cinnamon stick, or a few slices of fresh lemon in the pot are period-appropriate and keep the dish from tasting one-note. Add them with the sugar.
- ServingServed warm or cold at breakfast, with cream, or spooned over rice pudding or cottage cheese. The syrup keeps in the refrigerator with the fruit for about a week.
The fireless cooker was a genuine enthusiasm of the years around 1910: a wooden or metal chest packed with hay, asbestos, mineral wool or crumpled paper, into which a boiling kettle was sealed to finish cooking without further fuel. Butterick's cook book gave it a section of its own because it promised to save coal, to keep the kitchen cool in summer, and to let a woman leave the house while dinner cooked itself. Stewed prunes were an obvious candidate: cheap, keeping well in the dry state, valued as a laxative as much as a dessert, and needing exactly the long, low, unattended heat the box provided. California's prune orchards had by then made dried plums a cupboard staple in American kitchens, and stewed prunes appear on breakfast menus of the era with a regularity that later generations found comic.