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Apples, Compote Of
Put half a pound of sugar into a pan with a pint of water and the rind and juice of two lemons. Let it remain on the fire until the scum rises, then put in half a dozen large apples, pared, cored, and quartered. Let them simmer gently, leaving the lid off the saucepan, until the apples are clear. Time to boil, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain sugar-syrup poaching of apples, closer to French compote than to English stewed apple. The hinge is the syrup: it must be at a bare simmer and the fruit left alone, or the quarters collapse into sauce.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of sugar is about 225 g (a generous cup); a pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so about 570 ml. Six large apples comes to something in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 lb before peeling.
- Choose a firm appleThe recipe assumes a cooking apple that holds shape rather than one that froths into puree. Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Pink Lady or Honeycrisp quarter well; Bramley and McIntosh disintegrate in twenty minutes of simmering.
- "Until the scum rises"This is the sugar clarifying, not boiling down. Bring it just to a boil, skim the grey foam off the surface with a spoon, then drop the heat before the fruit goes in.
- "Until the apples are clear"Translucency is the real doneness test, not the clock. The flesh turns from opaque white to glassy as syrup replaces the air in the cells, which may take 12 minutes or the full 20 depending on variety and thickness.
- Lid off, and no stirringLeaving the pan open lets the syrup concentrate as the apples cook, though the recipe gives no reason for the instruction. Turn the quarters once, gently, with a spoon rather than stirring.
- The lemon rindPare the rind in wide strips with a peeler so it can be lifted out at the end. Grated zest cannot be removed and will cloud the syrup.
- Cooling and servingLift the fruit out with a slotted spoon and reduce the syrup for a few minutes if it seems thin, then pour it back over. Serve cool or cold with cream, custard or a plain sponge; it keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
- "Probable cost, 10d."Ten pence in pre-decimal currency, a costing convention Cassell's applies throughout. It is of no use as a modern price, only as a signal that this was a cheap sweet for a household of six.
Compote is simply the French for fruit cooked in syrup, and the word had long since settled into English cookery books as the respectable alternative to "stewed fruit" — the same technique, but with the fruit kept whole or in neat pieces and the syrup treated as part of the dish rather than as liquid to be drained away. The method is a lesson rather than a single dish: clarify a syrup, poach the fruit slowly with the lid off, judge doneness by appearance. Once learned it transfers to pears, quinces, plums and apricots with only the timing changed. The lemon is doing real work beyond flavour, since its acid, with the sugar, helps the fruit's pectin resist breaking down and so keeps the quarters intact — a mechanism no Victorian cook would have described in those terms.