The Saga of Canadian Pacific Strawberries

Call them prunes or dried plums, either way they have a long history. According to Rebecca Rupp (2011), in Western Europe, asparagus was among the touted recipes for the low-libido Renaissance man, along with prunes, garlic, nettle seed in wine, and dried fox testicles.

The French, with their stomachs forever at heart, knew their pruneaux, with the most renowned being those of Agen and Touraine. Prune tarts and tartlets have been a feature of French cuisine, along with a compote of prunes, prepared by soaking the fruit in either water or – doubtlessly much more to the Gallic taste – in either red or white wine. Explorers of Canada presumably relied to some extent in their travels on prunes. They commemorated this in Prune Island, Newfoundland, while Sudbury, Ontario, celebrates with a Prune Creek and Prune Lake and Cochrane in the same province also features a Prune Creek. Far to the northwest Prune Mountain is located in the Yukon.

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Prunes paved the way in the opening up of the Canadian prairies. As Canadian Pacific trains trundled their way westwards, eager settlers were regaled with stewed prunes rather than more elegant compote. Thus was born the legend of the ‘CP Strawberries.’ However, by the late 20th century things were not looking so good for prunes. Associated with constipation and the subject of scatological humour they were becoming down and out. This was of no little concern to the California Prune Advisory Board. The Golden State is a conspicuous producer of prunes – the 2013 crop was around 105,000 tons. But they are no longer called prunes, not in the United States of America anyway. Sales were slipping. Prune ice cream might be popular in the Dominican Republic, but this was not good enough. Enter Dr. Ernest Dichter, a Freudian psychoanalyst of Vienna. His advice? People were associating prunes with pale, humourless puritans. Ditch it, said Dichter. Instead, create happy, colourful advertising celebrating the prune as a dynamic wonder fruit. Good thinking, but research conducted in the U.S. showed that the target audience women ages 25 to 54, responded more favourably to the name dried plums, explains the organization’s website. And so it came to pass that the humble prune has been transmogrified into a dried plum. And January has been declared the California Dried Plum Digestive Health Month, courtesy of the (note the change) California Dried Plum Board. There is a sticking point, however. We learn from that font of information that prunes and their juice contain mild laxatives including phenolic compounds (many as neochorogeic acids and chlorogenic acids) and sorbitol. Prunes also contain dietary fibre (about 7%). Prunes and prune juice are thus common home remedies for constipation. So says the Wikipedia. Strangely though just over two years ago, in its Old World wisdom, the European Union ruled that prunes do not have a laxative effect and producers cannot say they do. Perhaps if they were called CP Strawberries . . .