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Stewed Prunes
Wash thoroughly a pound of prunes in luke warm water, and then put them into a saucepan with a pint of cold water in which half a pound of sugar has been dissolved, and add the juice and the thin rind of a lemon. Set the saucepan at the side of the fire and simmer gently for an hour, by which time the fruit should be tender enough to mash readily. Remove the prunes and drain them; then put the saucepan with the syrup in it over the fire, and boil it to the degree at which it is on the point of resolving itself into sugar. Put the prunes in a shallow dish, pour the syrup over them, shaking them until they are well covered, but using proper care not to break them. Let them stay in the syrup for twelve hours, and then pile them into a glass dish, and serve.
A straightforward stewed fruit, but the sugar ratio and the syrup reduction are doing more work here than the name suggests — this is closer to a candied prune in heavy syrup than a breakfast compote.
- The hinge: don't take the syrup too far"on the point of resolving itself into sugar" appears to mean boiling down close to the point where the syrup would crystallize; in practice, stopping around the thread stage (roughly 225-235F on a candy thermometer) is the safe reading. Push past that and it may set hard or crystallize around the fruit as it cools.
- Prunes then and nowPeriod prunes were sold dry and leathery, hence the warm-water wash and the full hour of simmering. Modern packaged pitted prunes are already moist and soft; they will be tender in 20–30 minutes and will collapse if given an hour.
- PitsThe recipe does not say whether the prunes are stoned; it simply warns against breaking the fruit while shaking it in the syrup. Pitted fruit is fine but more fragile — handle it once, when you pour the syrup.
- Sugar quantityHalf a pound of sugar to a pint of water is a generous cup of sugar to two cups of water, and it produces a very sweet result by current taste. Halving it still gives enough syrup to coat, though it will not thicken to the same degree.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range, the cooler edge of the top plate. Translate as the lowest burner setting, or a bare simmer with the lid ajar.
- The twelve-hour restNot optional flourish — this is when the syrup penetrates and the fruit plumps and glosses. Cover and leave at room temperature, or refrigerate if the kitchen is warm.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind" means peel taken with no white pith, in wide strips. Remove the strips before the final reduction or they will turn bitter and tough in the concentrated syrup.
- YieldA pound of prunes serves six to eight as a dessert or accompaniment. The syrup keeps well in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.
Stewed prunes were a fixture of American hotel and boarding-house tables around 1900, appearing at breakfast as a matter of routine and at dinner as a modest sweet — cheap, keepable, and available year-round when fresh fruit was seasonal. That Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen bothered with a version at all says something about how broad a great hotel's repertoire had to be: the same book that gave recipes for terrapin and canvasback also had to feed people who wanted prunes. The treatment here, with the heavy syrup and the overnight steeping, lifts the dish well above the watery institutional version that gave stewed prunes their reputation. Prunes themselves were largely a California product by this date, the Santa Clara Valley orchards having expanded sharply over the closing decades of the nineteenth century, though imported French dried plums did not disappear.