Prune Whip: or, Finding out why no one makes these anymore

Before we whip our prunes, a message: Millions of people in the US are losing food benefits. If you are considering buying groceries to drop off at your local food bank, think about donating money directly to them instead. Food banks often buy food at bulk rates, so your money will feed more people than if you did the shopping yourself. And of course, the people in charge of food banks have a firsthand view of what foods are needed. 

Right, on with the prunes...

The festival of refrigeration continues!

Prune Whip 1 cup (½ pound) prunes 1 egg* 1 tablespoon sugar       For the sauce: 1¼ tsp sugar Pinch of salt ⅓ cup cream or half-and-half 1 tsp vanilla Pour enough boiling water over the prunes to generously cover them. Cover and let stand overnight. The next day, drain the prunes. Then mash them, or puree them with a stick blender, or press them through a strainer (discarding the skins). Separate the egg, saving the yolk for the sauce. Beat the egg white until stiff peaks form. Add the sugar and beat until stiff peaks form again. Then, with the mixer running at high speed, add the prune pulp slowly, one spoonful at a time.  If desired, add a spoonful of lemon juice or a shake of cinnamon. After adding the last of the prunes, continue beating until stiff peaks form again. Place in a sealed container and refrigerate. To make the sauce, thoroughly beat the egg yolk, sugar, and salt. Whisk in the cream and vanilla, adding an additional tablespoon of cream if it's too thick. Place in a sealed container and refrigerate. Serve both the whip and sauce very cold. *If raw eggs are a concern, used pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs. Note: This recipe is halved from the original. Source: Handwritten note (probably 1930s-1940s)

For those who missed it, our refrigerator recently suffered multiple problems. We spent an insufferably long time ordering various parts, each time hoping this would be the one to fix it. Well, the refrigerator is back (at least for now), and so we are making things that must be served cold. We have served whiskey trifle and whipped apricots. It is now time for prunes!

This lovely penmanship specimen comes from my great-grandmother's binder. Every now and then I try to improve my handwriting, but my cursive always makes people tilt the paper and squint. The last time I decided to write the grocery list in cursive for practice's sake, it took me twice as long to get everything because I couldn't read my own notes.  

Anyway, prune whips seem to gotten popular as soon as every household had an eggbeater and an icebox. They peaked in the 1930s or 40s, and disappeared shortly thereafter. Perhaps people in this millennium just don't like the taste. Someone got assigned a prune whip several Pieathlons ago and was unimpressed.  

After letting the prunes sit in water overnight, this lovely sight awaited me:

I've heard that prunes taste better after cooking them, but these didn't undergo any magical flavor transformation.

As I have said in earlier posts, a lot of the more showoff-y recipes "of a certain era" feel like making baby food. I guess serving pulp was more impressive before blenders got cheap. 

After spending over half an hour with a stick blender for our apricot whip, I decided that a sieve might actually be faster. And it turns out that sieving fruit can be surprisingly satisfying if you used to like making mud pies. But surely someone doing this back in the day would have had a better way to do it than smushing prunes with their hands into a rusty spaghetti strainer. 

While we're mashing prunes, let's discuss why we don't seem to make prune whips anymore. First, a prune whip is a long undertaking whether you're using a sieve or a blender. At some point, you can't help stopping to ask "Do I really want to do all of this for prunes?" 

Secondly, I think a lot of the creative uses of dried fruits have gone away now that you can get fresh blueberries in November. 

Also, we don't eat prunes like we used to. They used to show up in recipes about as often as raisins, dates, and other dried fruits. But at some point they became a byword for, shall we say, uncorking oneself. Our Mom of Cookrye said that after a while, prunes became known as "old people food." I've also seen some people say that we stopped using prunes when sugar got cheaper. (You'll note that there's barely any sugar in the recipe.)

In broader terms, there used to be general idea of "elevating" your food into something better than the ingredients you brought home from the market. Or in other words, making your ingredients harder to recognize on sight. Hence shoving vegetables into gelatin molds and prunes through a sieve. 

Like, look at what people used to do to ribs. They even hid the charred bone ends under paper booties instead of showing them off like today's "grill masters." We don't want the ribs to look like a slab of meat that anyone could buy from the butcher, do we?

30 Ways to Serve Bacon, Armour, 1930s-ish

But even if you don't care about "transforming" or "elevating" your food, who wants to serve a big bowl of soggy prunes? Keep in mind that the prunes looked like this.

"Hold onto your spoons, everybody! We're having dessert tonight!"

Getting back to the recipe, we had a perfectly smooth prune pulp after a few minutes of sieving. I hate to say that the tedious way works better, but in this case sieving is better than a blender. Whether a prune whip is worth the bother is an entirely separate matter.  

 

I had worried about how I would clean the smashed-in pulp out of the sieve, but I didn't need to. One prune whip had ripped it apart. This thing has been through multiple spaghetti nights, but it apparently wouldn't have survived a single day in my great-grandmother's kitchen.

I hadn't expected the prunes to be so brown. Aren't plums purple? But regardless of how ugly our prune whip was getting, it was time to throw away the sieve and get out the electric mixer. I had my doubts that we could get our small allowance of egg whites to accept so many prunes.

Things actually looked kind of pretty in this brief moment.

I'm sure this part of the recipe would have been maddeningly tedious in the days when an electric mixer had to be paid off in installments, but we had this finished in less than two minutes. I was surprised at how much volume the prunes added to the mixture. There's only one egg white in this bowl. The rest of that is air and prunes.

Our finished whip was surprisingly bland. I wondered if chilling it would drastically change the flavor. If not, a bit of cinnamon and lemon juice would do wonders for future prune whips. But as disappointing as this tasted, it was very sweet. So I can see why people might have economically put prunes into desserts back when dried fruit was cheaper than sugar-- and later when sugar was rationed.

At this point I realized we hadn't added anything to keep the prune whip from deflating as it chilled. I've read that plums have a lot of pectin, and I guessed that's what should keep this aerated. Also, let's be realistic, anything with raw eggs has a short shelf life. If you're worried about whether your prunes will still be whipped after a week, then I hope you live somewhere with nationalized healthcare.

Speaking of raw eggs, it was time to make the sauce. I cut the recipe in half, but you won't have much sauce even if you make the full amount (starting with a pound of prunes!).

This looked like I should put it on the stove until it turns into a custard, so I thought that maybe that was too obvious to write. But the instructions clearly say to "Beat thoroughly and place in icebox to chill." Also, even if you made the full recipe amounts, you would need a very tiny saucepan. So I figured that after a half-minute with a whisk, our sauce was done. I could only guess that it would thicken in the refrigerator.

And now, we only had to follow the last dozen words of the recipe: "Place in icebox to chill. Serve both whip and sauce very cold." I was only too happy for the "very cold" part. Our revived refrigerator seems to want to either freeze everything or stay at room temperature. The pitcher of tea often has a thin sheet of ice on top. We would surely have the coldest prune whip in the neighborhood (if only because we are probably the only people making one).

By the time our whip had thoroughly chilled, it had also deflated. If artistic splats of runny foam are still trendy at high-end restaurants, this would have been right at home.

 

The prune whip tasted a lot better after it got cold. However, prune slime just isn't the same as prune whip. And so, I got out the mixer and beat it until it had regained its former height. I had initially wondered if it might never reinflate due to complicated food-science reasons. But it rewhipped just as well as the first time.

Oh wait- we need to add the sauce! By the way, it hadn't thickened or set up in the fridge at all.

Yes. I know what this looks like. Let's move on.

Despite spending all night in the refrigerator, our prune whip wasn't cold at all. Then I realized: when you whip something, you're adding a lot of room-temperature air. 

Short of getting out an extension cord and taking the mixer outside in freezing weather, I didn't know how I'm supposed to serve this "very cold." It deflates in the refrigerator, and then warms back up when I re-whip it. I wouldn't have fretted so much about properly chilling my prune whip, but it doesn't taste very good unless it's cold. 

I gave some light thought to the appliances of the day. Refrigerators back then were like enlarged versions of the mini-fridges that so many college students bring to their dorm rooms. You didn't have a separate freezer compartment so much as a little box at the top that was a lot colder than the space below. So perhaps by "serve very cold," we were supposed to put our prune whip right under the freezer compartment so it can get lightly frosted.

The inside of a refrigerator from the 1940s or 1950s. From Ebay

If it seems like I'm really reaching for any possible way to salvage this recipe without changing the directions, I was also thinking of all the prune whips that turn up in cookbooks "of a certain age." If prune whips didn't actually work, surely people wouldn't have kept republishing the lie for so many decades. 

After letting this freeze, it was a semi-decent ice cream. I wasn't excited about it. But if you want a fruit dessert in the wintertime, it'll do. It was still a little bland, though. I'm going to be nice to my great-grandmother and assume that prunes had more flavor back then. But I don't think our future has many prune whips in it.