For years, Carol Abrahams made pluma moos for her mother, who liked it but no longer prepared the family’s holiday meals. After her mother died, she made it for her siblings and her aunt. Last year, she didn’t make it at all.
Ms. Abrahams, a retired school social worker, and many of her Mennonite neighbors in Hillsboro, Kan., talk about the Easter and Christmas side dish like it’s fruitcake — a holiday tradition that may not be anyone’s favorite anymore.
“I kept making it for family reasons,” she said, adding, “I don’t know if my daughters will ever make pluma moos.”
Carol Abrahams still stirs pluma moos on the stove for the holidays.Credit…Arin Yoon for The New York Times
Moos, which rhymes with dose, generally means fruit soup in a Low German dialect spoken by Mennonites who moved from the Netherlands to Eastern Europe, then all over the world, in search of religious freedom. Across the Mennonite diaspora, moos incorporates everything from Canadian chokecherries to Paraguayan papaya. In south-central Kansas, where thousands of Mennonites settled in the late 1800s, it usually comes in just two varieties: cherry or pluma, which is also spelled “plume,” “plüme” and “plumi.”
Now, in a mostly rural and small-town Kansas community that’s treasured it for generations, it seems to be fading away. But this ingeniously simple dish deserves a place on every holiday table.
Made from long-simmered prunes and raisins, pluma moos transforms run-of-the-mill dried fruits into a lush, puddinglike soup or compote that pairs well with Easter ham and fried potatoes. It can look like cranberry sauce, but at its cream-fortified richest, it’s more like custard, with notes of dark caramel and red wine from the fruit.
Ms. Abrahams uses dried cranberries instead of the traditional raisins in her pluma moos and adds dried apricots. Arin Yoon for The New York Times
Long before the Mennonite Central Committee commissioned Doris Longacre to write the “More-With-Less Cookbook,” which became a 1970s hit, ultimately selling nearly a million copies, Mennonites worldwide had established themselves as resourceful cooks.
Pluma moos is an adaptable luxury for lean times, when the only fruit in the kitchen might be coming out of a farmhouse attic or the back of the pantry. Some Kansas cooks swap the raisins for dried cranberries and supplement with dried apricots or apples. Nearly every recipe calls for cinnamon, but some families also add cloves, allspice and star anise.
There’s a more substantial divide between those who pour in milk or cream at the end and those who don’t. (In the definitive book “Mennonite Foods and Folkways From South Russia,” the culinary historian Norma Jost Voth quoted a Canadian Mennonite on cream in moos: “No! No! No!”)
A flour mixture stirred into the simmering fruit thickens pluma moos.Credit…Arin Yoon for The New York Times
Even the serving temperature depends on the circumstances. “Right after I make it, I like it hot,” Ms. Abrahams said. “After that, I like it cold. That’s kind of the way it is.”
Beyond those preferences is a thornier question — whether Kansas Mennonites still like pluma moos enough to keep it around. Cherry moos, a simply sweet, pinkish-red cousin made from fresh, frozen or canned fruit, has become far more popular, though (or perhaps because) it doesn’t have the same dark-fruit richness or complexity. Even in some Mennonite circles, pluma moos has the cultural cachet of, well, prune soup.
“Everybody still knows about it, but they know it as the bowl of gray slime at Easter dinner,” said Alec Loganbill, editor at Plainspoken Books and a millennial Mennonite from Hesston, Kan. Prunes are far from fashionable, and raisins in desserts can be an instant turnoff. Cook them into a sticky porridge, and you’re unlikely to win over skeptics, regardless of the flavor.
Ms. Abrahams prefers pluma moos hot out of the pot.Credit…Arin Yoon for The New York Times
Even though Ms. Abrahams’s daughter and granddaughter eat her pluma moos, they may not cook it themselves.Credit…Arin Yoon for The New York Times
Or it may be that younger generations have written it off as old-fashioned, which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I think I’ve had it maybe once, years and years ago,” Mr. Loganbill said. Moos isn’t going away in Kansas because of cherry moos’s relative popularity, but it would be a shame if pluma moos vanished into history. There’s nothing else in the holiday lineup with its jammy appeal.
Getting pluma moos into more modern kitchens might require minor updates, like cutting back on the sugar or chopping the fruit for a friendlier texture, to avoid the waterlogged hunks of prune that understandably unnerve Mennonite grandchildren and outsiders. But there’s nothing so dated about the idea or the flavor that Kansans — and others — couldn’t fall in love with it, making a new tradition of their own.
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