[Sca-cooks] To bake a tarte of prunes (redaction and questions)

[Stefan li Rous]

Magdalena asked:
> Here's a wacky idea.  Can anybody fill me in on terminology here?  When
> we think of "prunes" we think of dried plums, not fresh ones.  I've seen
> plums called plums in other period recipes.

Not that wacky of an idea. The question of whether the word meant dried
or fresh plums has come up before. Here is one of the messages in my
plums-msg file that talks about this.
--
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris            Austin, Texas          stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****

> Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 20:28:32 -0400
> From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
> Subject: Re: SC - Plums period?
>
> Terry Nutter wrote:
> > Adamantius writes:
> > >If you're talking about the little Italian Prune plums, then while I
> > >don't know for sure that they're period, I can only assume that
> > >something very like them were what dried prunes were made from. They, of
> > >course, were pretty widely used in perod, all over Europe.
> >
> > Hmmm... "prune" is the Middle English word for plum (well, one of them;
> > an earlier is "bola").  In English recipes, there's no indication that
> > prunes are used dried, and expert opinion is primarily to the contrary.
> > But I don't know about the continent.  I've been assuming that they were
> > using the fresh too; but that's an assumption.  Do you have any data?
> >
> > When a variety is mentioned in English recipes, it's normally damsyns,
> > but I have no idea whether they are also available now.
>
> Damson plums may have been a Middle Eastern import, like several other
> items supposedly from Damascus. You can generally find damson plum
> preserves in many supermarkets.
>
> I can't think exactly where, but I'm sure I saw a recipe from the
> medieval English corpus that calls for bullace plums, another variety
> which I seem to recall is an unusually firm, "cooking" plum.
>
> My only real evidence that suggests that dried prunes were used is from
> comparatively late period. I do think it significant, though, that in
> some of the earlier recipes calling for several fruits, the fruits seem
> to be listed according to their state of freshness, which might also be,
> coincidentally or not, an indication of diminishing quantity in the
> recipe. So, you have the ubiquitous apples and pears, folowed by
> raisins, dates, currants, and prunes. I guess if the prunes show up
> (when they do at all) right after the pears, then there's no way of
> knowing.
>
> I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is a question of availability,
> with fresh and dried being used interchangeably, depending on the
> season.  It seems pretty clear that the later sources, many of which
> call for prunes to be soaked in warm water or wine until they plump up,
> are calling for dried fruit.
>
> Adamantius