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 Two: Cooking for the Rent
How do you pay your rent if no one will hire you? Racist real estate practices confined most lower caste renters to redlined blocks, which packed more people into fewer buildings and drove rents up rather than down. A 1924 Urban League study found that tenants in those neighborhoods paid forty to sixty percent more than dominate caste tenants for identical apartments. Some families answered by doubling up, renting beds by the day and by the night, and turning to rent parties one Saturday a month.1Neighbors paid at the door, a pianist played, and the host sold plates and drinks until the revenue collected at the end of the night covered the rent. Harlem hosts in 1932 charged between fifty and seventy-five cents at the door. A pianist earned about seventy-five cents and a meal, which made live music nearly free and drew a crowd that would have cost real money at a club. Cards passed hand to hand did the marketing at no cost at all. Langston Hughes, looking back, remembered a fish sandwich or a chicken leg going for fifteen or twenty cents, and remembered that some of the finest pianists in Harlem learned their trade playing rent parties. Sweets belonged to rent party menus. A pound of prunes bought for pennies filled a pie that sold by the slice, and Goodbody’s recipe reuses the cooking liquid from the stewed fruit in part one of this series, so the breakfast pot becomes an essential pie ingredient. A tablespoon of flour does the thickening a wealthier kitchen would have gotten from eggs or cornstarch. Nothing in the formula requires refrigeration, a delivery, or a license. That combination of low input cost and high sale price is what turned a column into a livelihood, and it explains why the recipe pages of the lower caste newspapers mattered as much as the front page.3
Much of the revenue at rent parties came from liquor sales, which put hosts on the wrong side of Prohibition and, after repeal, on the wrong side of liquor licensing. Some hosts brought in promoters who guaranteed a crowd and paid off officials in exchange for half the profits. The hosts who kept selling plates and pies after repeal held on to a legal, repeatable revenue stream, and the ones who had built the whole operation around a jug did not.4
Historian Alex D. Ketchum argues that pricing is a political decision, because what an operator charges reveals whose interests the business actually serves. She also identifies the rule that food rebels break: lower caste people are expected to work in kitchens, not to own them. A woman selling pie out of her own front room on the last Friday of the month broke that rule quietly, monthly, and at scale across three or four cities at once.5
Prune Pie Recipe
Ingredients
1 lb. prunes
Pastry for a two-crust pie
¾ cup sugar
1 tablespoon flour
2 tablespoons lemon juice
About ⅔ cup prune juice
Butter
Directions
Soak a pound of prunes, then cook them until tender and remove the stones. Cut the prunes into pieces and lay them in a pastry-lined pie plate. Mix ¾ cup sugar with 1 tablespoon flour and sprinkle the mixture over the fruit. Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice and about ⅔ cup of the prune juice. Dot with butter, cover with a top crust, and bake in a hot oven.
The Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1932.