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Stuffed Raisins
Pick large fine table raisins over and lay in a bowl; cover with boiling water and let them stand until they are plump; seed and fill with a paste made of chopped almonds, English walnuts and candied cherries.
A confection rather than a cooked dish: the whole job is plumping the fruit and getting a paste stiff enough to hold its shape. A few of the terms and assumptions need translating.
- Table raisinsThese are large dessert raisins sold on the stem for eating out of hand, not the small seedless baking kind. Muscat or the modern equivalent, jumbo Muscatel or large Flame raisins, works; you want fruit big enough to split and fill.
- Seeded, not seedlessThe instruction to "seed" tells you these raisins still had pips. Slit each one lengthwise along one side, flick out the seeds, and use that same slit as the opening for the filling. With modern seedless fruit you simply make the slit.
- Don't oversoakThe recipe says only to let the raisins stand until plump, with no time given. A few minutes in the boiling water is generally enough to swell the skins; left much longer they can go slack and tear when opened. Drain and pat dry before filling.
- Making the pasteChop the almonds, walnuts and candied cherries very fine, or pulse briefly in a food processor. The cherries supply the sugar and the moisture that binds; if the mixture is crumbly add another cherry or a few drops of the raisin soaking water rather than plain sugar.
- Blanching the almondsThe recipe does not say whether the almonds are blanched. Blanched almonds give a cleaner colour and a less tannic paste, though skin-on is fine if you want the flecks.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given in the recipe. As a starting point, 8 oz of raisins will take something like 3 oz of nuts and 2 oz of cherries between them; the number of pieces depends on the size of the fruit.
- Serving and keepingNothing in the recipe covers finishing or storage. Rolling the filled raisins in granulated or caster sugar stops them sticking, and small paper cases suit them. They will keep several days in a tin between layers of waxed paper.
Stuffed fruit belongs to the tail end of the Victorian dessert table, where dates, prunes, figs and raisins filled with nut paste were served with the nuts and bonbons after dinner or handed round at Christmas. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks often gathered this sort of thing together in sections of dainty or fancy dishes: no cooking, little skill, and a result that looked like it had come from a confectioner's shop. The ingredients had also become easier to get by this period. Large table raisins from Malaga and, increasingly, from California, along with candied cherries and shelled English walnuts, could be had from the grocer, so a household could assemble a plate of sweets without a sugar boiling thermometer or a marble slab.