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Prune Jelly
Wash in a little warm water a pound of prunes, and place them in a stewpan with sugar to taste, a small piece of lemon peel, a stick of cinnamon and enough water to cover, stewing them until they become quite tender. When done, remove the stones and pass the prunes through a fine hair-sieve; crack the stones and mix the kernels with the prunes. Next soak one ounce of gelatine in a small quantity of water, and mix it in with the prunes, adding two wineglassfuls of port wine. Turn the jelly into a stewpan, and boil it for a few minutes, stirring it all the time. Blanch two ounces of sweet almonds, and split them lengthwise into halves, ornament the inside of the mould with them, fastening them with a little liquid jelly, and stand it on the ice to cool. When ready, dip the mould quickly into hot water to loosen the jelly, wipe it, and turn the contents onto a dish, pour around the sauce, and serve.
The moulded jelly itself is unremarkable, but one instruction in the middle of it disqualifies the recipe: the prune stones are to be cracked and the kernels stirred into the purée.
- The kernels are the problemPrune stones are plum stones, and the kernel inside contains amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. Crushing and wetting it releases hydrogen cyanide through the action of the enzyme emulsin, which is why bitter kernels of plum, apricot, peach and bitter almond were once valued as flavouring and are now treated as a poison risk.
- Quantity is out of rangeA pound of prunes yields on the order of forty to sixty stones, depending on size. Several dozen crushed plum kernels blended into a single moulded dessert is well beyond a trace flavouring, and is enough to make the dish a real risk rather than merely old-fashioned.
- Boiling does not fix itThe recipe does boil the mixture for a few minutes after the kernels go in, and heat does drive off some hydrogen cyanide. It is not a reliable or measurable reduction, and the kernels are mixed into a thick purée where volatiles are held rather than released.
- What the kernels were forThey supplied the bitter-almond note that Victorian and Edwardian cooks wanted in stone-fruit sweets. That flavour is now obtained from almond extract or commercial benzaldehyde, neither of which carries a cyanide risk.
- The gelatine is also unusable as givenOne ounce of gelatine of the period is not necessarily equivalent to an ounce of modern powdered gelatine, and no liquid volume is stated beyond 'enough water to cover' and two wineglassfuls of port. The set cannot be predicted from these figures.
- The sauce that never appearsThe final line says to pour the sauce around, but no sauce is specified anywhere in the recipe.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a moulded prune and port jelly. The prunes, the port, the cinnamon and lemon peel, and the blanched sweet almonds lining the mould are all sound; only the cracked stones are not.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is associated with a large American hotel kitchen, though Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the book is a compilation. Moulded fruit jellies were a common cold dessert of the period — cheap in materials, spectacular on a platter. The prune was an everyday American pantry item by the 1890s, sold dried by the pound and stewed for breakfast as often as for dessert; dressing it up with port, cinnamon and a mould lined with split almonds turned a plain commodity into something a dining room could charge for. The use of the cracked stone is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply: cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently treated peach, apricot and plum kernels, along with bitter almonds and noyau, as ordinary flavourings for creams and custards. The hazard was understood only gradually, and such directions became rare in print during the twentieth century.