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Prunes in Brandy
Pack the plums in layers in a wide-mouthed bottle strewing a liberal quantity of powdered sugar over each layer; fill it up with the best brandy, cork, and stand the bottle in the corner on a warm stove. After a few hours time, remove the bottle, and after letting it stand for a short time, the plums are ready for use, although they are somewhat improved by longer keeping.
The infusion itself is unremarkable — fruit, sugar, spirit — but the method turns a sealed glass bottle of high-proof alcohol into a pressure vessel sitting on a hot stove. That single instruction is why this page is for reading rather than following.
- The corked bottle is the problemHeating a stoppered bottle drives off alcohol vapour with nowhere to go. The cork becomes a projectile at best; at worst the glass fails. Nineteenth-century stove corners were warm shelves beside the firebox, not a modern burner, but the physics were the same and the practice was risky then too.
- Brandy vapour near an open flameEthanol vapour escaping past a cork is flammable and heavier than air. Near a wood, coal or gas flame it can ignite. Nothing about the recipe accounts for this.
- No temperature and no time"A warm stove" and "a few hours" give no way to judge how hot the bottle is getting or when to stop. Without a measured temperature there is no safe version of the instruction to reconstruct.
- Prunes or plumsThe title says prunes, the text says plums. In period usage the words overlapped freely, and the recipe does not make clear whether fresh or dried fruit is meant.
- "The best brandy"The recipe specifies neither type nor strength. The heating step appears intended to hurry the infusion, which a long cold steep accomplishes on its own.
- If you want brandied fruitUse a current, tested recipe for macerating fruit in spirits. Do not adapt this one by guessing at a lower temperature.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, collected this among the small sweetmeats a large hotel kitchen kept on hand. Fruit preserved in spirit is an old form of confectionery still in domestic use, and is often said to have been common in European households long before refrigeration, since sugar and alcohol together will hold fruit for long periods without heat processing. The confusion of "prune" and "plum" in the heading is period-typical — the French prune means plum, and English-language cookbooks of the era used the two words loosely. What dates the recipe most is the stove itself: a coal or wood range had a permanently warm corner, a piece of low, steady heat that no modern kitchen has and that the recipe here puts to use in hurrying an infusion along.