Home › Puddings › For Sauce (Lb prunes wineglassful sherry)
For Sauce (Lb prunes wineglassful sherry)
½ lb. prunes 1 wineglassful sherry wine 1 lemon ½ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon For pudding. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add carrots, potatoes, raisins, currants, crumbs, flour, baking powder, salt, and milk. Turn into Criscoed mold, cover, and steam steadily for three hours. For sauce. Soak prunes in water over night, after first washing them. Next day put them in pan with water they were soaked in, just enough to cover them, simmer gently until quite soft. Do not allow to boil, or fruit will be spoiled. Take out stones, crack some, and save kernels. Rub prunes through sieve, add sherry, kernels blanched, grated rind and strained lemon juice, and cinnamon, and then, if thicker than rich cream, add more wine, or water, and use. 2 squares chocolate
This page is a sauce for a steamed carrot-and-potato pudding, and the transcription has come apart: the pudding's ingredient list is missing, only the sauce ingredients are given, and a stray "2 squares chocolate" belongs to the recipe that followed. More importantly, the sauce directs the cook to crack the prune stones and eat the kernels inside, which is why it should not be made in this form.
- The kernels are the problemPrune stones are plum stones, and the seed inside contains amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed, crushed or ground. The recipe gives no quantity at all — "crack some" — so there is no way to know what dose ends up in the sauce, and blanching does not remove the glycoside. Use a current prune sauce recipe instead.
- Why the period called for themCooks of the era treated plum, peach and apricot kernels as a source of bitter-almond flavour, the same reasoning that put bitter almonds and noyau in Victorian desserts. The flavouring compound and the toxin come from the breakdown of the same glycoside.
- Missing pudding ingredientsThe pudding instructions name Crisco, sugar, carrots, potatoes, raisins, currants, crumbs, flour, baking powder, salt and milk, but no amounts survive on this page. Nothing here is sufficient to build the pudding from.
- A wineglassfulIn turn-of-the-century American cookbooks a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup — not a modern stemmed wineglass. The instruction to thin the finished sauce with "more wine, or water" means the total is meant to be judged by consistency, not measured.
- "Criscoed mold"House style throughout this book: grease the mold generously with the shortening the recipe is selling. Any solid fat does the same job.
- Do not allow to boilThe recipe insists on a gentle simmer, saying only that boiling will spoil the fruit; it gives no reason beyond that.
- Three hours of steamingA covered mold set in simmering water, water topped up as it evaporates and kept at least halfway up the mold. The long steam is what sets a suet-style pudding without drying it; it is not a timing modern practice has shortened.
- Consistency and yieldConsistency -- The finished sauce should pour like rich cream, thinned with more wine or water if needed. The recipe gives no yield and no serving count.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the recipes in it — credited to Marion Harris Neil — exist to show that the new fat could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every branch of cooking. A steamed pudding built on grated carrot and potato is the book making its case at the hardest point: the traditional version depends on suet, and this one does not. Carrot-and-potato puddings were already familiar as the economical cousin of plum pudding, the root vegetables supplying moisture and sweetness where fruit and fat were dear. The prune sauce belongs to the same thrifty logic, extracting flavour from the dried fruit's soaking water and, in the manner of the period, from the stones as well.