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Melon, Compote Of
Pare and slice the fruit, and place it in boiling syrup, which should be made of white sugar, water, and any light wine. When the fruit is tender, lay it out in a dish, and cover it with syrup. Time to boil, five to ten minutes. Probable cost, according to the season. Sufficient, a pound of sugar to half a pint of water.
A Victorian dessert compote that depends entirely on the melon: firm, barely ripe fruit holds its shape, while a soft ripe one collapses into the syrup within minutes.
- The syrup ratioA pound of sugar to half a pint of water is a heavy syrup — in imperial measure about 10 fl oz (roughly 1¼ US cups) water to 450 g sugar. It thickens considerably as it cools; the fruit is meant to come out tender and glossy rather than stewed to a pulp.
- "Any light wine"Read this as a dry or off-dry white — a Riesling or a Muscat. The recipe lists water and wine together without saying in what proportion, so treat the wine as part of the liquid rather than an addition to it; a sweet fortified wine would push an already heavy syrup over the edge.
- Choose the fruit for firmnessCantaloupe, charentais or an underripe honeydew all work. Watermelon does not: it sheds water and goes stringy. Cut slices no thinner than 1 cm or they will disintegrate.
- Five to ten minutes is realUnlike many Victorian timings, this one is not inflated. Test at five minutes with the point of a knife — the flesh should be translucent and yielding but still holding its edges.
- Reducing the syrupLift the fruit out first, then boil the syrup down for a few minutes if it seems thin, and pour it over. Leaving the melon in while the syrup reduces is how it turns to pulp.
- Serve coldThe book gives no serving note. Compotes of this kind were generally served cold, and the syrup thickens usefully as it cools.
- YieldOne medium melon and this quantity of syrup gives four to six small servings.
Cassell's places this among the fruit compotes — a French borrowing that meant, in the nineteenth-century English kitchen, fruit poached in sugar syrup and served in its own liquor, distinct from a jam or a preserve because it was made for immediate eating rather than for keeping. Melons were a glasshouse crop in Britain, grown on hotbeds by gardeners of the larger houses. The book gives no price, only the formula "probable cost, according to the season" — a stock phrase used throughout this style of dictionary for many seasonal ingredients. Cooking a melon at all strikes modern readers as odd, but the Victorians treated it far more like a vegetable-fruit than we do — pickled, made into preserves and mangoes, and served in compote.