Six Prunes in a Dish is a Series on the Depression-Era Pantry recipes from Colonel Goodbody’s “Our Daily Food” published in the The Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1932
Part One: The Shelf That Held the Family Together
In August 1932, three years into the Great Depression, a columnist writing under the name Colonel Goodbody answered that question with a dried plum. His weekly column, “Our Daily Food,” ran in The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most widely circulated weeklies serving lower caste readers in the country, a paper that traveled by rail and by Pullman porter from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi Delta. Goodbody opened in the orchards of California’s Santa Clara Valley, which then dried and packed roughly half the world’s prune supply, and within a few sentences he had moved indoors to the one place his readers actually controlled: the pantry shelf. Goodbody described a package of prunes as an anchor and a jar of stewed prunes as the answer when visitors arrived and the house had nothing to serve. He was teaching household finance through fruit. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that food carries messages about rank, obligation, and who belongs where, a process he calls gastro-politics. Isabel Wilkerson describes caste as the underlying framework that assigns worth before anyone speaks, and the food system enforced that ranking daily through wages, credit, and inventory. So the column did the only thing a newspaper can do. It handed over the method and let it travel free. That is the quiet radicalism of “Our Daily Food.” Goodbody could not lower the price of pork or integrate a lunch counter, but he could teach a fifteen-year-old to soak a pound of fruit overnight and turn it into a week of breakfasts, and he could do it for the price of the paper.
[Side Bar]
Liner Note. Colonel Goodbody published this method in “Our Daily Food,” his column in The Pittsburgh Courier, on August 20, 1932. Prunes reached his readers by rail from the Santa Clara Valley, dried and boxed, and they sat on the shelf without ice in a decade when most lower caste households in the South and the industrial North still cooled food with a block of ice or with nothing at all. Goodbody’s instruction to soak the fruit and then simmer it in its own soaking water is the entire economy of the dish: the water becomes syrup, so nothing leaves the pot and no sugar has to be bought. He tells the cook outright that sugar is unnecessary, an unusual claim in a decade of cheap cane, and reaches for lemon instead. Serve it hot at breakfast, or keep a jar cold for the visitor who arrives unannounced.6
Stewed Prunes Recipe
Ingredients
1 lb. prunes
Water to cover
Juice of ½ lemon, or 1 slice of lemon
Cream (optional)
Directions
Soak the prunes overnight or for several hours. When the fruit has softened and plumped, set it to cook in the water it soaked in. Simmer slowly. Slow simmering is the secret. Cook until the prunes turn tender and the juice runs rich and thick. Sugar is not necessary. Add a little lemon juice before the prunes finish cooking, or drop a slice of lemon in with them while they simmer. Serve with or without cream.
The Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1932.