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Orange and Raisin Compote
Stone six ounces of muscatel raisins, and mix them with three or four ounces of powdered lump sugar and three table-spoonfuls of brandy and sherry mixed. Cover these, and take six sweet oranges, free them from the outer rind and inner white pulp, remove the pips, and slice the fruit thinly. Grate the rind of one of the oranges, and mix it with the raisins, etc. Then put the oranges in a deep dish with a table-spoonful of lemon-juice and the same of castor sugar, and pour the raisins, etc., on the top. Cover again for an hour, and serve. This compote is improved by setting the dish on ice while the flavours are blending. Probable cost, 1s. 9d.
An uncooked compote that is really a macerated fruit salad: the only work is knife work, and the only skill is patience while the flavours marry.
- Muscatel raisinsThese are large, seeded raisins dried from Muscat grapes, sold whole and sometimes still on the stem. "Stone" them means split each one and pick out the seeds. Modern seedless raisins skip that step; 6 oz is about 1 cup.
- Powdered lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar crushed to a powder. The recipe lists castor sugar separately a few lines on, so the two were not treated as the same thing, though a fine sugar is the nearest modern stand-in. Three to four ounces is roughly 1/2 cup, which is generous against six oranges; start with half and taste.
- The spiritsThree tablespoons total of brandy and sherry mixed, not three of each. A medium or cream sherry suits the raisins better than a fino.
- Preparing the oranges"Outer rind and inner white pulp" means zest and pith. Cut the top and bottom flat, stand each orange up and cut the peel away in strips following the curve, then slice across into thin rounds and flick out any pips.
- Zest before you peelThe recipe asks for the grated rind of one orange but tells you to peel them all first. Grate one orange before it is peeled, or you will be scraping a discarded strip of skin.
- The macerationThe recipe gives no time for the first covering of the raisins in sugar and spirit; the stated hour belongs to the assembled dish, which the text says is improved by standing on ice. Both stages can run longer — several hours in the refrigerator is better than one.
- Serving and yieldSix oranges serve four to six as a light dessert. Spoon up the syrup that collects in the bottom of the dish with each portion, and serve with a plain sponge or thin cream if you want it less austere.
- That price1s. 9d. is a shilling and ninepence.
Compote in this sense — fruit steeped or lightly cooked in sugar syrup, served cold — belongs to the French repertoire that Victorian cookery books absorbed wholesale, and it is among the simpler sorts of dessert because it needs no fire at all. Its appearance owes a good deal to the Victorian orange trade: Mediterranean sweet oranges arrived in Britain cheaply through the winter months, which is precisely when a household had little fresh fruit and a jar of dried Muscatels in the store cupboard. The instruction to set the dish on ice is worth noticing — ice was a commercial commodity in late-century Britain, drawn from Norway, North America and local harvesting alike, and a recipe that assumes access to it is quietly telling you what sort of kitchen the book expected.