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Peaches, Compote Of
Divide six or eight ripe peaches into halves. Make a syrup by boiling six ounces of loaf sugar in half a pint of water for eight minutes. Put in the fruit, and let it simmer gently for five minutes. Drain the peaches from the syrup, take off their skins, and put them into a compote dish. Add to the syrup a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, or, if procurable, two table-spoonfuls of red currant juice. When lemon-juice is used, two or three drops of cochineal should also be added, to colour the syrup slightly. Let it boil three or four minutes longer, then pour it over the peaches. Blanch three or four of the kernels, split them in four, and place a quarter here and there upon the fruit. Serve either hot or cold. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost of peaches, 2d. to 6d. each. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A simple poached-peach compote whose only real complication is the garnish the original insists on. Everything else is straightforward Victorian sugar work.
- The kernel garnish is the problemPeach kernels — the seed inside the stone — contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or wetted. Blanching in the sense used here (a brief scald to loosen the brown skin) does nothing to destroy it, and the recipe places the raw quartered kernels directly on the fruit to be eaten. Three or four kernels scattered over a dish for six is a small dose, but it is a real one, and it is entirely unnecessary; use a current recipe for peach compote.
- Why the book does it anywayPeach and apricot kernels were the standard Victorian source of bitter-almond flavour, used the way almond extract is used now. The poisonous action of prussic acid was known in the period, but domestic cookery books did not concern themselves with the dose in a few kernels, and commercial ratafia and noyau flavourings were made from the same material.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; six ounces is about 170 g, a generous three-quarters to seven-eighths of a US cup.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups — not one US cup. With six ounces of sugar that gives a light syrup, thin enough to pour but tacky after the final boil.
- Peeling after poachingThe five-minute simmer loosens the skins so they slip off in the hand, the same principle as blanching tomatoes. Ripe fruit peels cleanly; underripe fruit will not, and no amount of extra simmering fixes that — it only turns the flesh to mush.
- Red currant juicePresumably the strained juice rather than a jelly or bottled syrup, supplying both acid and colour. Red currants are seasonal and short-lived, and the recipe offers lemon juice and cochineal for when they are not to be had.
- CochinealCarmine, made from dried scale insects, still sold as a food colour under E120 or "carmine". It is not vegan and is a rare allergen. Two or three drops is meant to tint the syrup pink, not redden it.
- YieldSix or eight peaches halved gives twelve to sixteen halves, i.e. about two a person for the stated six to eight, which is a fair serving even as the whole of the sweet.
Compote — from the same root as compost, meaning simply something put together — was the standard nineteenth-century way of presenting whole or halved fruit that was ripe enough to eat but improved by a little sugar and heat, as distinct from a preserve meant for keeping. Cassell's places it in the general run of dessert entries alongside other fruit compotes, all built on the same syrup and differing chiefly in the flavouring acid. The costing is the interesting part: twopence to sixpence for a single peach marks this as a dish for a household with a glasshouse or a good fruiterer. English peaches were largely wall-grown or forced under glass well into the twentieth century.