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Stewed Prunes
One pound fine prunes, half pint cold water, half pint claret, half a stick cinnamon, four ounces granulated sugar, two bay leaves, the rind of a small sound lemon.
Place the prunes in a vessel with two quarts of cold water to soak for twelve hours. Thoroughly drain and place them in a saucepan with all the above articles. Cover the pan and let boil very gently on the range for thirty minutes. Remove the pan from the fire, pour into a glass or stone jar, and let it get cold. When serving discard bay leaves, cinnamon and lemon peel. As stewed prunes should always be served cold, a larger quantity can be prepared and kept in a covered glass or stone jar, for they will keep in good condition for several days.
A red-wine prune compote, meant to be made ahead and eaten cold. Almost nothing needs changing except the soak, which modern prunes no longer require.
- The soakTwelve hours in two quarts of water suited the hard, air-dried prunes of the period. Today's moist-pack pitted prunes are already soft; an hour is generous, and very plump ones can go straight into the pan. If you skip the soak, the fruit will drink less liquid, so check that the syrup has not reduced too far.
- Half a pintAn American half pint is one cup, so a cup of water and a cup of wine for a pound of fruit. That is barely enough to cover soaked prunes — use a narrow pan so the liquid comes up around them, or turn them once or twice during cooking.
- ClaretClaret meant red Bordeaux, or anything sold as its likeness. Any dry, unoaked red works: a Merlot-dominant blend, a light Cabernet Franc, a Beaujolais. Avoid anything heavily oaked or jammy, which fights the cinnamon.
- "Boil very gently"Read this as a bare simmer, the surface barely moving. A hard boil for thirty minutes risks breaking the prunes down and dulling the wine's fruit.
- Two bay leavesNot a misprint; bay does turn up with dried fruit in some European compotes, and the leaves come out before serving. Modern California bay is much stronger than Turkish bay — use one if that is what you have.
- Lemon rind"Sound" meant unblemished. Pare it in strips with a peeler, taking no white pith, and remember to fish it out with the bay and cinnamon.
- SugarFour ounces is half a cup, which is on the sweet side for today's already-sweet prunes. Three ounces gives a syrup that still sets up glossy without cloying.
- Keeping and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of prunes will serve roughly six as a compote. "Several days" assumed a cool larder; refrigerate the jar and eat within a week. The syrup thickens as it chills.
Prunes stewed in red wine with cinnamon, citrus peel and bay recall the dried-fruit compotes of central and eastern Europe, where plums were dried in quantity every autumn and cooked back to softness through the winter — a tradition that also gives us German Backobst and the dried fruit of Ashkenazi tzimmes. The bay leaf, which reads oddly to modern eyes in a sweet dish, may point to a savoury-adjacent usage in which dried fruit accompanied roast meat as readily as it ended the meal. Stewed prunes were in any case a common item on American breakfast menus of the period, and a claret version would have distinguished a kitchen's offering from the plain water-stewed sort.