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Orange Compote, with Pineapple
Tinned pineapple does admirably for this dish. Slice as before, and put in alternate layers in a dish; then boil the syrup from the pine with a little sugar, and pour over. One or two bananas may be added. This may be flavoured with rum, brandy, or any desired liqueur.
A two-line entry that assumes you have just read the preceding orange compote, so the quantities and the orange preparation are missing entirely. Everything here hinges on the syrup: it is the only cooked element, and it wants to be hot and slightly reduced when it goes over the fruit.
- "Slice as before"The instruction points back to the entry immediately preceding, though from this text alone it is not certain whether it is the pineapple or the oranges being sliced "as before". Where oranges are used, pith left on will turn the dish bitter after a few hours in syrup.
- Working quantitiesNone are given. Four or five oranges to a standard 20 oz (565 g) tin of pineapple fills a medium glass dish and serves four to six.
- Tinned pineapple has changedVictorian and Edwardian tinned pine was generally packed in a heavy sugar syrup, which is what the recipe boils down. Many tins today are in juice or light syrup, so you will need rather more sugar — start with 2 to 3 tablespoons per tin and taste — and a slightly longer boil to get any body.
- Reduce, then pour hotBoil the syrup two or three minutes until it just coats a spoon. Poured hot over the fruit it draws out orange juice and slackens again as it cools; poured cold it sits on top and never penetrates.
- The bananasAdd them sliced at the last moment, after the syrup has cooled to warm. Hot syrup turns banana to mush, and cut banana browns within the hour even under syrup.
- SpiritsStir the rum, brandy or liqueur in once the syrup is off the heat, a tablespoon or two, so the alcohol is not driven off. Kirsch and orange liqueurs suit this better than a heavy dark rum.
- Resting and servingThe recipe says nothing about resting, but a couple of hours in the cold lets the syrup and the orange juice marry. Serve cold, on its own or with plain cream.
Compote in the French sense means fruit cooked or steeped in sugar syrup and served in its syrup, as distinct from a preserve; the word shares its root with compositum, something put together. What dates this entry is the confidence in the tin. Commercial pineapple canning began in Singapore in the later 1880s, while large-scale Hawaiian canning belongs to the 1900s — Dole's company was founded in 1901 — and by the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was circulating, tinned pine had gone from a curiosity to something an ordinary household could buy and a cookery writer could recommend without apology — note that the syrup, once an expensive thing in its own right, is treated as a free asset to be boiled down rather than poured away. The banana appears in the same spirit: steamer traffic had made both fruits cheap enough that a dish which would have been extravagant a generation earlier could be dashed off in three sentences.