Today’s recipe is one for a historic pudding. It can be found here:

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018241-prune-pudding

Ah, the Great Depression. A time in which average Americans were struggling to make ends meet, and foreign dignitaries were complaining about the food served in the White House.

In fact, FDR’s White House gained a reputation among world leaders for serving food that was, by their standards, absolutely horrible. This is because Eleanor Roosevelt took it upon herself to simplify the fare served to the First Family and dignitaries. This was more about image than about cutting domestic costs: Americans wouldn’t want to hear about the elaborate meals served in the White House when they themselves were struggling to find enough to eat every day.

Personally, I think the meals described by records sound absolutely fine, I salute Eleanor Roosevelt for the effort, and I find the response of the dignitaries absolutely abhorrent. What’s disgusting isn’t the hard-boiled eggs, but the high horse of anyone choosing to criticize food on merit of taste when an entire nation is starving. However, my opinion might not match the opinions of most people out there, because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself from writing about food for a semester, it’s that I tend to treat food strictly as fuel, and evaluate it by its utilitarian merits. I maintain a philosophy that taste does not matter, and neither does enjoyment, in my personal food consumption. I would happily switch to some sort of Silicon Valley astronaut mush for all of my meals if it was cheaper, healthier, and saved me time. I would never force it anyone else or impose it upon society as a whole, but I’d do it in a heartbeat. Maybe this means I shouldn’t be writing a food blog. Actually, this definitely means I shouldn’t be writing  food blog. But here we are.

Anyway, pudding.

Let prunes stand in water. Boil them. Chop them. Put them back in water and let them simmer. Add sugar and cinnamon and a cornstarch slurry for thickening purposes. Allow to cool fully. Serve in small containers.

I followed the instructions faithfully, with the slight exception of the cornstarch- most of my cornstarch experience isn’t with boiling materials, since I never thicken jams and preserves, so I wasn’t expecting it to curdle the way it did and had to take some of the cornstarch out. It seemed thick enough anyway.

There is actually way more of it than this, I just separated a portion of it into this bowl for aesthetic reasons.

Like revenge, this pudding is a dish best served cold, so I had to wait a while to taste the fruit of my labor. However, by the time it finally cooled, it didn’t make me think of pudding at all. I tried a spoonful and realized- I’ve just made jam from dried fruit.

I know I really do not have a lot of pudding experience, but I cannot imagine consuming more than a tablespoon or two of this at a time. Indeed, even as I added the required sugar faithfully, I cringed, since the habit within my household is always to decrease the amount of sugars in anything by almost half, and ideally to get rid of them entirely. Especially considering it was the Depression, I was surprised at the amount of sugar I had to pour into this. And, indeed, it is jam. I promptly moved it all into a jar.

This is good, because it means I may consume it slowly over a matter of months instead of trying to inhale all of this pudding in my judgemental sugar-free family before it goes bad. This is less good, because I make liters and liters and liters of jam from the berries and fruits we grow every summer, and now no one in this house eats any of it, and we still have so much, please help me.

Anyway, this recipe is really exciting. The texture of the jam- I’m going to call it jam- is not unlike strawberry, and the flavor is mild and comforting. I’m curious how this would work with other fruits. I’m really curious to try this recipe again with dried apricots once society comes out of self-isolation and I can go buy dried apricots.

Final thoughts: it wasn’t pudding, but it was good anyway. People who are scared of prunes as an ingredient on principle need to grow up. I recommend.