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Prune Pudding
Scald one pound French prunes, let them swell in the hot water till soft, drain and extract the stones, spread on a dish and dredge with flour; take a gill milk from a quart, stir into it gradually eight table-spoons sifted flour; beat six eggs very light and stir by degrees into the remainder of quart of milk, alternating with the batter; add prunes, one at a time, stir the whole very hard, boil two hours, and serve with wine-sauce or cream. -Mrs. Emma L. Fay.
A boiled batter pudding of the English school, thickened with nothing but eggs and flour and studded with prunes. The original assumes you know how to set up a pudding mould or cloth in a pot of boiling water.
- The hinge: dredge the prunesCoating the drained prunes in flour is what keeps them from sinking to the bottom of a thin batter. Skip it and you get a plain batter pudding with a layer of fruit at one end.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. It is taken from the quart of milk, not added to it, so the total liquid stays at one quart (4 cups).
- Why the milk goes in twiceThe gill is used to make a smooth, lump-free slurry with the eight tablespoons (half a cup) of flour before the rest of the milk and the eggs are worked in. A whisk or blender makes short work of what she does by degrees.
- French prunesImported dried plums, usually understood to be of the Agen sort, and sold as a better grade than common dried plums. Modern pitted prunes are already soft; a five-minute soak in hot water is plenty, and the stoning step disappears.
- "Boil two hours"Traditionally the batter went into a floured cloth or a closed mould immersed in boiling water. The modern equivalent is to steam it in a covered, well-buttered mould set on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Fill the mould no more than two-thirds, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- Six eggsEggs of the period are generally thought to have run smaller than today's large, so five large eggs may come closer to the volume she intended; six will simply make a firmer, more custardy pudding.
- Wine sauceA nineteenth-century hard or stirred sauce: butter, sugar and sherry or madeira, sometimes with an egg yolk. Cream, as she allows, is the easier option.
- YieldServes about eight. The batter with the prunes comes to close on two quarts, so allow a mould larger than two quarts if it is to be filled only two-thirds. It is best turned out hot and eaten the same day; a boiled batter pudding goes leaden once cold.
Boiled and steamed puddings came to American kitchens straight from English practice, where a batter of eggs, milk and flour tied in a cloth and dropped into the copper was among the cheapest ways to feed a table. The Dixie Cook Book, one of the large late-nineteenth-century compilations assembled from contributed household receipts, prints dozens of them under Puddings and Sauces, each signed with the name of the woman who sent it in. The prunes mark it as a winter dish: dried fruit was what a household had in the months when nothing fresh was to be had, and "French prunes" distinguished imported fruit -- generally taken to be the Agen sort -- from common dried plums, dearer and worth naming for that reason. The accompanying wine sauce is the standard genteel finish of the period, and its presence in a Southern collection published in the 1880s says something about the aspirations of the audience as much as the taste.