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PEACHES, COMPOTE OF (another way)
Pare, halve, and stone half a dozen ripe peaches, and simmer, until they are soft enough to be pierced by a needle, in a syrup, made by boiling a quarter of a pound of sugar in half a pint of water for a quarter of an hour. When done enough, put them into a dish, and pour half the syrup over them. Throw into the other half of the syrup two pounds of ripe peaches, which have been pared, cored, and sliced; add four ounces of sugar and a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, and simmer the fruit, stirring it constantly, until it is reduced to a firm, smooth, dry pulp. Spread half of this in a smooth layer at the bottom of a glass dish, pile the stewed peaches in the centre, fill the spaces between them with the remainder of the marmalade; then reduce until it is quite thick the half of the syrup which was first taken out, and pour it upon the fruit. Garnish the dish with macaroons, blanch and slice the kernels, and strew them equally over the surface. Time to prepare, one hour or more. Probable cost, 3s. or 4s. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A two-part dessert — poached peach halves set on and among a thick peach marmalade, glazed with reduced syrup. The construction is sound; the final garnish is not.
- The kernelsThe instruction to blanch, slice and strew the kernels — read as the kernels from the peach stones — is the reason this cannot be made as printed. Peach stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or ground; period cookery used peach kernels as a cheap stand-in for bitter almonds. Raw sliced kernels scattered over a cold dish are eaten whole and uncooked, which is the worst case.
- Macaroons meant almondThe macaroons of a Cassell's dish are the crisp almond kind, close to modern amaretti, not the coconut macaroon or the French macaron. Some period almond biscuits were made with a proportion of bitter almond, which is worth knowing when reading period baking alongside this recipe.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 285 ml — a fifth more than a US half-pint. A quarter of a pound of sugar is roughly 115 g, four ounces about 115 g again, and two pounds of peaches a little over 900 g.
- "Pared, cored and sliced"Peaches have a stone, not a core; the phrasing is borrowed from apple-and-pear instructions. Read it as stoned.
- Boiling the syrup a quarter of an hourFifteen minutes of boiling at that sugar-to-water ratio will drive off a good deal of the water and leave a noticeably heavier syrup. On a modern burner the sugar needs only to dissolve and the syrup to come to a simmer.
- The needle testPiercing with a needle rather than a knife point is the right instinct for poached fruit — it tells you the flesh has softened without opening a cut that lets the half collapse. Ripe peaches need only a few minutes.
- YieldSix to eight, as stated, and the book's estimate of 3s. or 4s. is high, which probably points to hothouse or imported fruit rather than anything seasonal and cheap.
Compote is simply the French for fruit stewed in syrup, and by the time Cassell's was compiled the word had settled into English cookery books as the respectable, lightly sweetened alternative to a heavy preserved fruit. What makes this version characteristic of the late nineteenth-century British kitchen is the layering: a dry, reduced fruit pulp he the the older sense of any fruit boiled to a stiff paste rather than anything to do with oranges or whwhole poached halves, then glazed and finished with a bought biscuit garnish. Peaches in Britain then came either from walled gardens and glasshouses on large estates or, increasingly, by fast steamer and rail from the Continent, and the estimated cost of three or four shillings is strikingly high for what is essentially stewed fruit. The scattering of kernels over the top belongs to a long tradition of using the stone's inner nut for a bitter-almond flavour, a habit found throughout Victorian and earlier confectionery.