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Preserved Prunes
Wash well two or three pounds of prunes, and place them in a saucepan with enough water to cover them, adding the grated rind of a lemon; set the pan over a slow fire and cook gently until the fruit is quite tender, then remove, and pass through a sieve. To each pound of the pulp, use three-quarters of a pound of sugar; place the sugar in a preserving-pan with a little water, and, when it is melted, add the pulp. Boil it for fifteen minutes longer, skimming frequently. Keep the preserves in jars or pots until used.
This is a prune butter rather than a whole-fruit preserve: the fruit is cooked soft, sieved, then boiled with sugar. A few points where 1896 practice and a modern stove diverge.
- "Prunes" means dried plumsNot fresh plums. Two to three pounds of pitted dried prunes is a large batch; a pound is plenty for a trial run, keeping the same proportions.
- Pit them first if they are not alreadyThe recipe assumes you will sieve the pits out, which works but wastes pulp and clogs the sieve. Buy pitted prunes and you lose nothing.
- "A slow fire"A bare simmer on low heat, lid on, 30 to 45 minutes until the fruit collapses. Prune pulp scorches readily once it thickens, so keep the heat gentle and stir the bottom.
- Sieve or food millA food mill with the medium plate does in two minutes what a wooden spoon and a hair sieve did in twenty. A blender or processor works too, but gives a slightly grainier texture because the skins are chopped rather than held back.
- The sugar ratioThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of pulp is roughly 1 3/4 cups sugar to about 2 cups pulp. Weigh the pulp after sieving, not the fruit before cooking.
- "A little water" for melting the sugarTwo or three tablespoons is enough to keep the sugar from catching before the pulp goes in. Any more and you will boil it off again.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingAt this sugar level fifteen minutes of hard boiling should bring it close to a thick spreadable paste that mounds on a spoon; judge by the spoon rather than the clock. The recipe asks for frequent skimming, and because the mixture is opaque and heavy it spits, so use a deep pan and a long spoon.
- Lemon rindGrated zest cooked with the fruit and then pushed through the sieve gives an even, mild perfume. Add it in strips instead if you want to lift it out cleanly.
- Storage"Jars or pots until used" implies a cool larder and, in this period, commonly a paper or wax seal rather than a processed vacuum jar. Treat this as a refrigerator preserve, good for a few weeks, or freeze it in small containers. If you want a shelf-stable jar, follow a current tested canning procedure for fruit butters.
- YieldAbout 2 to 2 1/2 cups from a pound of prunes.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated máitre d'hôtel, published his enormous Cook Book in 1896, and its preserving chapters are as much household reference as hotel practice: the same pages that instruct a banquet kitchen also tell a cook how to put up fruit for the year. Prunes had a particular place in the American larder of the period. Dried plums shipped and stored indefinitely, arriving first from France and Bosnia and then, by the 1890s, in bulk from California's rapidly expanding orchards around Santa Clara and the Sacramento Valley, which made them cheap enough to be a breakfast staple, an invalid dish and a filling for pastry. Reducing them to a sweetened pulp of this kind — a fruit butter rather than a jam, since a dried fruit has no whole shape to preserve — gave a spread for toast and a ready filling for tarts and prune whips, both fixtures of turn-of-the-century American menus.