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Apple Compote
Take twelve "Greenings;" pare, quarter and core them; drop in cold water. Put the apple parings in a pan, adding one pint of water and the same of white wine; boil fifteen or twenty minutes; pass the contents through a sieve; place on the fire again with half pound of white sugar and some lemon peel; drop the apples in and stew them slowly for a few minutes or until tender. Place each piece of the fruit on a dish to cool; boil down the syrup to about half the quantity you had after taking out the apples, and add the juice of half a lemon. Pour the syrup over the fruit and serve.
A straightforward stewed-apple dish whose whole point is the syrup: the flavour comes from the parings, not from the apples themselves. Cook the quarters gently and briefly or you will have applesauce.
- GreeningsRhode Island Greening, a firm tart green cooking apple still grown but rarely sold in supermarkets. Granny Smith or Northern Spy hold their shape in the same way; avoid soft eating apples such as Red Delicious, and note that Bramley, though tart, cooks down to a purée.
- The parings are the recipeApple skins and cores carry a good deal of the pectin and aroma, so the discards become the poaching liquid. Wash the apples well before peeling, since the peel is what flavours the syrup.
- QuantitiesOne pint water plus one pint white wine is 2 cups each; half a pound of sugar is about 1 cup. Use a dry or off-dry white — a modern sweet wine will push the finished syrup past cloying.
- Straining"Pass through a sieve" most likely means straining the parings and pressing some pulp through rather than reducing them to a purée. The finer the sieve, the clearer the syrup; hard pressing or a blender will cloud it.
- Poaching time"A few minutes" is accurate — 5 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer for quarters, tested with a skewer. Lift them out the moment they yield, as they continue to soften while cooling.
- Lemon peelPare it in wide strips with no white pith, and take it out before reducing the syrup or it turns bitter. The juice goes in at the end so the brightness survives the boiling.
- ReducingBoil the strained liquid down by half to a light syrup that coats a spoon. It thickens further as it cools, so stop short rather than late.
- Yield and servingTwelve apples give roughly 8 servings. Serve cool or lightly chilled, with cream, custard or a plain sponge; well reduced, the syrup may thicken considerably in the refrigerator.
A compote is fruit cooked whole or in pieces in sugar syrup, from the French compote, itself from Latin composita, "put together" — the same root as English "compost." Unlike a sauce or a marmalade it deliberately preserves the shape of the fruit: the achievement on the plate is intact quarters in a clear syrup. The Rhode Island Greening named here was one of the great American cooking apples of the nineteenth century, prized for holding firm and staying tart, and it appears frequently in period recipes before commercial orchards narrowed to a handful of sweeter, shipping-friendly varieties. The thrift of simmering the parings for the syrup is characteristic of the household manuals of the era.