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Puree of Prunes
Soak one and a half pounds California prunes in lukewarm water over night, drain, remove stones and place in large saucepan with a sliced medium onion, two branches parsley, two branches chervil, two bay leaves, two cloves, one cinnamon stick, one and a half ounces sugar, half teaspoon salt and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Crack prune stones and place with prunes. Moisten with a gill claret, one pint pure tomato juice, one pint demi-glace, and one and a half quarts white broth. Lightly mix, cover pan and let slowly boil one hour. Remove, pass puree through sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan; add, little by little, half ounce good fresh butter; constantly mix with wooden spoon until thoroughly melted. Remove, pour puree into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a classical hotel-kitchen soup — a sweet-savoury prune puree built on demi-glace and white broth — but one instruction in it puts the whole pot out of bounds.
- The cracked stonesPrune and plum kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. Cracking the stones from a pound and a half of prunes — on the order of sixty or more kernels — and simmering them for an hour in the soup extracts that into the liquid, and straining afterwards removes the solids but not what has dissolved out of them. Use a current recipe if you want a prune soup.
- Why the stones were there at allThe kernel gives a bitter-almond, marzipan note that classical kitchens prized in stone-fruit dishes; the flavour, rather than thrift, appears to be the point of the instruction. Nothing in the method is careless by the standards of its own period, which is part of why these kernels stayed in professional recipes so long.
- GillA quarter-pint: about 4 fl oz (half a cup) by American measure, about 5 imperial fl oz by British. The two differ by around a fifth, but against the several pints of liquid here the difference is immaterial.
- Demi-glaceA brown veal or beef stock reduced with espagnole sauce to a glossy, lightly thickened base. A pint of it is a serious commitment of stock; commercial demi-glace concentrates are sold in tubs and diluted.
- White brothUnbrowned stock — veal or chicken simmered without roasting the bones, so it stays pale. A quart and a half of it plus a pint of demi-glace tells you this was made in a hotel with stockpots already running.
- Saltspoon and Chinese strainerA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. A Chinese strainer is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh sieve; the recipe passes the soup twice, first through an ordinary sieve to break it down and then through the chinois for texture.
- ChervilAn anise-scented soft herb, sold fresh at some greengrocers and easy to grow but rarely stocked in supermarkets. It loses everything when dried.
- YieldRoughly two and a half quarts of liquid going into the pan, before any loss in the hour's simmering — ten or more first-course servings, which is the scale a tureen implies.
Prunes in a savoury soup look eccentric now, but sweet-sour fruit pottages ran through European cookery from the medieval spiced broths to the eastern and central European fruit soups still eaten cold in summer. The tell here is the construction: onion, parsley, chervil, bay, clove and cinnamon, moistened with claret, tomato, demi-glace and white broth, then sieved twice and finished off the heat with butter. That is the standard pur instead