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Greengages, Compote Of
Boil six ounces of loaf sugar, with one pint of water, for a quarter of an hour. Remove the scum as it rises, put in the fruit, and simmer gently for another quarter of an hour, or until the plums are tender, but unbroken. Care must be taken not to let the plums break, or the appearance of the dish will be spoilt. Lift them out singly with a spoon, and put them into a glass dish; let the syrup cool a little, then pour it over them. The greengages should be eaten cold. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plain sugar-syrup compote that depends entirely on keeping the fruit whole. The original assumes you know how much fruit to buy and what a loaf of sugar is.
- Quantity of fruitThe recipe never states it. Six ounces of sugar to a pint of water is enough syrup for roughly 1 lb of greengages, which also matches the stated yield of three or four servings.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent; caster dissolves faster if you prefer.
- The hinge: barely a simmerPlums split when the syrup moves. Bring it to the point where a bubble breaks every second or two and hold it there, uncovered, without stirring. Move the fruit only by tilting the pan.
- Choose underripe fruitGreengages at full ripeness collapse in hot syrup. Firm fruit with a little green still in it holds together and softens to the right texture in fifteen minutes; dead-ripe fruit may need eight to ten.
- Whole or halvedLeft whole, the skins tend to burst at one point and the fruit slumps. Pricking each gage two or three times with a needle relieves the pressure. Halving and stoning them is the more reliable route, though it costs the dish its appearance.
- SkimmingThe scum in the first fifteen minutes comes from impurities in period sugar and matters far less with modern sugar. Skim any froth thrown off after the fruit goes in, or it will cloud the syrup.
- Cooling and thickeningThe syrup thickens as it cools. If it seems thin once the fruit is lifted out, reduce it for a few minutes on its own, then let it cool before pouring over, or the residual heat will keep cooking the plums.
- Probable cost5d is fivepence in pre-decimal currency, a figure Cassell's supplied for most of its recipes so a housekeeper could budget. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
The greengage is a green-skinned dessert plum, and in Britain the name is generally traced to Sir William Gage, an eighteenth-century Suffolk landowner in whose gardens the variety is said to have been established after its French label was lost; the French call the same fruit reine-claude. Compotes of this kind — fruit poached whole in a light sugar syrup and served cold in a glass dish — were a staple of the Victorian dessert course, cheaper and lighter than a pie or a pudding and valued precisely because the fruit still looked like fruit. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran dozens of them, one for nearly every fruit in the English garden, and greengages had a short late-summer season that made them a seasonal treat rather than a standby. The insistence on unbroken fruit reflects the period's habit of judging a dessert by its appearance at table as much as its flavour.