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Damsons, Compote Of
Make a pint of syrup in the following manner. Take eight ounces of loaf sugar and one pint of water; let it simmer on the fire until the sugar has melted, then throw in the white of an egg, and take off the scum as it rises. When the syrup has boiled fifteen minutes, drop into it, one by one, a quart of sound damsons, and simmer until soft, without breaking them. Remove them from the syrup, and boil it again until rather thick, let it cool, and pour it over the damsons, which should have been previously arranged in a glass dish. A glass of whipped cream is a nice accompaniment to this dish. Time to boil, syrup, fifteen minutes; damsons, about five minutes. Probable cost, without cream, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward fruit compote whose only real difficulty is cooking damsons soft without letting them burst. Everything else is a matter of translating Victorian sugar, measures and money.
- The hinge: barely simmerDamson skins split the moment the syrup moves at more than a lazy tremble, and once split the fruit collapses and clouds the syrup. Keep the pan just below a simmer and turn the fruit with a spoon rather than stirring; five minutes is genuinely all most ripe damsons need.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken off in lumps — the cleanest sugar available at the time. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the nearest modern substitute; 8 oz is a little over a cup.
- A quart of damsonsFruit measured by volume: a quart is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb (550–700 g) of whole damsons. The syrup quantity here is generous, which is the point — the fruit should be submerged.
- Clarifying with egg whiteThe white is beaten lightly and stirred into the warm syrup; as it sets it traps impurities, which are then skimmed off as scum. With modern refined sugar there is little left to clarify, so the step can usually be dropped.
- The stones stay inDamsons cling to their stones and the book does not pit them. Warn anyone at the table, or pit the fruit after cooking, when the flesh releases more willingly.
- Reducing the syrupAfter the fruit is lifted out, the syrup is boiled down to a light coating consistency — think maple syrup rather than jam. Pour it over the fruit cold, or the damsons will go on cooking in the dish.
- "A glass of whipped cream"A serving measure rather than a precise quantity; a Victorian 'glass' could mean anything from a wineglass of about 2 fl oz upwards, so read it as a small dish of cream whipped and served alongside. Unsweetened is better against so sweet a syrup.
- Yield and costFour to five as written. The "probable cost, 1s" is a shilling in late-Victorian money and is of historical interest only.
The damson is a small, tart, blue-black plum long grown in English hedgerows and orchards, and its name is generally traced to damascene — the plum of Damascus — reflecting an eastern Mediterranean origin for the type. Too sharp to be pleasant raw, it was overwhelmingly a cooked and preserved fruit: damson cheese, damson jam, damson gin. A compote of this kind sat between the two, a dish of whole fruit held in a sugar syrup that would keep a few days but was meant for the table rather than the store cupboard.