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STEWED PRUNES (Cover the fruit with cold)
Cover the fruit with cold water the day before cooking, and let it soak all night. The following morning remove the prunes from the juice, boil the latter, add sugar to please the taste, and boil for fifteen minutes longer. Put in the
A simple compote whose only real technique is the overnight soak. Note that the text breaks off mid-sentence — the prunes go back into the syrup and cook until tender, about 10 to 20 minutes depending on how dry they were.
- The soak is the whole methodCold water overnight rehydrates the fruit slowly and evenly, so the skins do not split and the flesh does not turn to pulp. Use enough water to cover by an inch or two; that water becomes the cooking liquid and carries most of the flavour.
- Prunes have changedThe hard, leathery dried plums this recipe assumes have largely given way to soft, partly rehydrated pitted prunes sold in bags. Those need little or no soaking — an hour is plenty — and only a few minutes in the syrup.
- Sugar to taste, in numbersFor a pound of dried prunes, start at 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar and adjust. Today's softer, partly rehydrated prunes taste sweeter than hard dried fruit would have, so this is one place where erring on the low side is sensible.
- Boiling the juice firstThe liquid is boiled, then sweetened and boiled fifteen minutes longer, concentrating it into a light syrup before the fruit goes back in. The fruit then needs only enough time in the syrup to heat through and soften.
- Why it sits in the candy chapterWhere it sits -- If this stewing method is grouped with the candies rather than the desserts, that reflects a looser sense of the category than we use now. For something closer to candied fruit than compote, reduce the syrup further after the prunes come out and pour it back over them.
- FlavouringsA strip of lemon peel, a cinnamon stick, or a spoonful of lemon juice added to the syrup is period-appropriate and keeps the sweetness from going flat.
- Yield and keepingA pound of dried prunes gives roughly six servings. Cool, cover and refrigerate; they keep a week and improve after a day in the syrup.
Prunes — dried plums — were a fixture of the late nineteenth-century American pantry because they travelled and stored well and were cheap by the pound. California plantings, particularly of the Agen-type plum around the Santa Clara Valley, had begun in the 1850s and were growing through the century, though French dried prunes were still being imported in quantity through the 1880s and 90s, and cookbooks of the era treat prunes as a year-round standby for breakfast dishes, puddings and sweetmeats. Their reputation as a laxative was already established. That this stewing method appears among the candies rather than the desserts reflects a looser nineteenth-century sense of the category: fruit boiled in sugar syrup sat comfortably beside taffy and fondant.