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Prune Souffle
1 cup prune pulp 2 eggs teaspoon salt teaspoon cinnamon cup prune juice 1 tablespoon lemon juice Grated rind of 1 lemon Mix the first 6 ingredients. Remove the stones from the cooked prunes and force the pulp through a sieve. Add lemon juice and prune pulp. Stir in dry ingredients. Add yolks of eggs beaten until light and lemon-colored. Fold in whites beaten until stiff. Turn into greased baking dish and bake in a slow oven. Set baking dish in pan of water.
A baked prune souffle of the water-bath type, closer to a light steamed pudding than a modern soufflé. The quantities as printed are incomplete, so treat the proportions below as a guide and adjust to a batter that mounds softly on a spoon.
- The hinge: the water bathSetting the dish in a pan of hot water keeps the egg from curdling and the edges from setting before the middle rises. Fill the outer pan with boiling water to about halfway up the baking dish and do not let it boil dry.
- Slow ovenA slow oven in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 300 to 325F, though the term was never fixed. At that heat a 1 1/2-quart dish takes roughly 45 to 60 minutes; the souffle is done when the centre is just set and no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- Missing fractionsThe fractions before the salt, cinnamon and prune juice have dropped out in printing; 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/2 cup prune juice are plausible readings. The direction to 'stir in dry ingredients' suggests sugar was meant to be listed and has been lost too -- 1/3 to 1/2 cup, depending on how sweet the prunes are, suits this quantity of pulp.
- Prune pulpSimmer about 1/2 lb dried prunes in water until very soft, drain (keeping the liquid for the prune juice), pit, and press through a sieve. A food mill or a short blitz in a processor gives the same result faster; you want roughly 1 cup of smooth puree.
- Egg whitesBeat only to soft-firm peaks that still bend at the tip. Whites taken to dry stiffness break up when folded into a heavy fruit purée and the souffle rises unevenly.
- Order of workThe instructions double back on themselves. In practice: combine purée, prune juice, lemon juice and rind, stir in sugar, salt and cinnamon, beat in the yolks, then fold in the whites last and bake at once.
- Yield and servingServes about four. It sinks a little as it cools, as baked fruit souffles do, so send it to the table straight from the oven with cream or a thin custard sauce.
Prunes were a staple of the American winter pantry well into the twentieth century: dried, cheap, shipped easily, and mild enough to carry sugar and spice. Cookbooks and promotional booklets promoted them, partly on grounds of economy and partly because such publications leaned toward foods thought good for digestion. Baking a fruit puree with beaten eggs in a water bath was a common way to turn a cheap ingredient into a company dessert without cream or a pastry crust, and the same method appears in period books with other dried fruits.