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Oranges and Apples, Compote Of
Take half a dozen fine sweet apples and three oranges. Rub the skins well with a soft cloth, and cut them across in very thin round slices. Arrange the pieces alternately in a circle in a glass dish, with one piece half over the other, and pour over them a syrup made according to the directions given in a succeeding recipe (see ORANGES, COMPOTE OF). Serve when cold. Time, five or ten minutes to boil the syrup. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
An uncooked compote: the fruit is only sliced and dressed with hot syrup, so the quality of the fruit and the thinness of the slices carry the whole dish.
- The hinge: slice paper-thin, peel and allBoth fruits are cut across in whole rounds with the skin left on, which is why the cloth-rubbing matters. Anything thicker than about 2 mm gives you a mouthful of leathery orange peel and pith; a mandoline or a very sharp knife is the difference between elegant and inedible.
- Choose the oranges for their skinThin-skinned, fine-grained fruit works here navel or Valencia rather than a thick, spongy-pithed variety. Scrub off any wax with warm water before slicing, since the peel is eaten. Blood oranges look striking arranged against pale apple.
- Apples that hold up rawUse a crisp sweet eating apple Gala, Braeburn, Cox not a cooker, which will taste raw and starchy. Core them first so the rounds show a neat hole, and slip the cut slices into water with a squeeze of lemon to stop them browning while you build the dish.
- The syrup referred toThe syrup referred to he one given under ORANGES, COMPOTE OF. A plain sugar-and-water syrup boiled for the stated five to ten minutes, at roughly equal parts sugar and water, gives a light syrup suited to this quantity. Adding the juice and a few pared strips of zest from an extra orange improves it considerably.
- Pour hot, serve coldThe syrup should go over the fruit while still hot so it draws juice from the slices and glazes them, then the whole dish chills. Allow two to three hours in the refrigerator; overnight is better, as the peel softens and loses its bite.
- Yield and costYield and cost " is p. Six servings, as stated. The "8d." is pre-decimal pence.
- VesselA wide shallow glass bowl is not decoration for its own sake the overlapping circle of alternating slices is the entire point, and it disappears in an opaque dish.
The compote ruit dressed briefly in sugar syrup akes its name from the French compote, generally traced to Latin composita, "put together." By the 1870s and 1880s, when this dictionary was compiled, Mediterranean and later Spanish oranges were arriving in British ports in bulk and by rail, which helps explain a dish for six priced at eightpence. What dates it most is the instruction to eat the peel: whole-slice orange dishes turn up elsewhere in Victorian cookery writing, from a period before fruit was waxed for shipping.