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Currants, Compote Of
Pick a quart of ripe red and white currants quite free from dirt. Put half a pound of loaf sugar and a breakfast-cupful of cold water into a saucepan. Simmer the syrup gently for a quarter of an hour, then put in the currants, and simmer them for ten minutes longer. Put the fruit into a compote dish, pour the syrup over it, and serve cold. Currants prepared thus are excellent served with blancmange or a rice mould. Probable cost of currants, 4d. to 6d. per quart. Sufficient for a good-sized dish.
A light stewed fruit in sugar syrup, meant to be eaten cold the same day rather than kept. The one thing to watch is the second simmer: ten minutes will reduce ripe currants to skins and seeds.
- A quart of currantsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 1 lb 4 oz (550-600 g) of fruit on the stalk, a little less once stripped. Strip them by running a fork down each stalk, or hold the truss and comb it through the tines of a fork.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in solid cones, broken up with nippers before use. It was simply refined cane sugar; ordinary granulated is the direct equivalent. Half a pound is 8 oz, about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- A breakfast-cupfulThe breakfast cup was the largest of the Victorian cups, holding roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Take it as 1 cup (240 ml), which gives a thin syrup that thickens as it cools.
- The ten-minute simmerThis is the hinge. Currants are thin-skinned and burst within two or three minutes; modern practice is to slip them into the syrup, bring it barely back to a tremble, and take the pan off the heat so the fruit finishes in the residual warmth. Ten minutes gives you a rough sauce, not a compote of whole berries.
- Red and white togetherWhite currants are an albino form of the same plant, slightly sweeter and less sharp. If you can only get red, the dish works but is markedly more acid; taste the syrup and add a spoonful more sugar before the fruit goes in.
- Skim and cool undisturbedSkim the froth off the syrup during the first fifteen minutes, or the finished dish looks cloudy. Pour over the fruit while hot, then leave it alone to cool; stirring breaks the berries.
- SettingCurrants are relatively high in pectin and acid, so the syrup may thicken a little as it chills, though with this much sugar and so brief a cooking it is unlikely to set. Serving it alongside blancmange or a rice mould sets the sharp fruit against something bland and firm.
- YieldThe book says only "sufficient for a good-sized dish"; reckon on roughly four to six as a dessert fruit, or more as an accompaniment. Eat within a day or two; there is not enough sugar here to preserve anything.
Compote is the French term for fruit cooked whole or in pieces in a sugar syrup, and in nineteenth-century English kitchens it was generally distinguished from jam or preserve: a compote used little sugar, was made in small quantity, and was served the same day, often in a footed glass or porcelain "compote dish" of the kind Cassell's assumes the reader owns. Red and white currants (Ribes rubrum) were common in British and northern European gardens rather than a market luxury, ripening in a short summer window, which is why the book quotes a price by the quart. The suggested pairing with blancmange or a rice mould is characteristic of the period's dessert logic, where a sharp, brightly coloured fruit was set against something white, sweet and starchy.