Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pears, Compote Of
Pears, Compote Of
When ripe, juicy pears are used for making compotes they should be stewed whole, but when hard baking pears only are to be had it is best to cut them into halves or quarters, reserving only one large piece to put in the centre. Peel the pears, and put them into the syrup. The proportion of sugar to be used will depend upon the quality of the pears. Put with them a few drops of prepared cochineal, and either a strip of lemon-rind, a quarter of a stick of vanilla, or a few cloves. Simmer very gently until they are quite tender without being broken, then drain them well, put them on a dish, boil the syrup quickly until it is thick: when it is cold, and just before the compote is to be served, strain, and pour the syrup over the fruit. The pears are to be boiled until tender. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. for a dish. Sufficient for five or six persons.
Cassell's assumes you already know how to make a sugar syrup, so the quantities here are left to judgement. The hinge is heat: the poaching liquid must never do more than tremble, or the pears collapse and the dish is ruined.
- The syrupNo fixed proportions are given; the book leaves the sugar to the cook's judgement of the fruit ("the quality of the pears"). A workable base is 2 cups water to 1 cup sugar for ripe fruit, up to 1½ cups sugar for hard baking pears, which take longer to soften. Enough to cover the fruit completely is the real requirement.
- Baking pearsThese are firm, dense cooking varieties — Bosc and Concorde are the closest supermarket equivalents. A ripe Bartlett or Comice will fall apart if treated the same way, which is exactly why the recipe splits its instructions between whole and quartered fruit.
- CochinealPrepared cochineal was a red colouring made from dried scale insects, sold by the bottle to Victorian kitchens. Carmine or cochineal extract is still sold as a natural food colour; a drop or two of any red colouring does the same job, or leave it out and accept pale fruit.
- Simmer, do not boil"Very gently" means bare surface movement, well below a rolling boil. Ripe pears may be tender in around 15 minutes; hard baking pears can need considerably longer. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- Reducing the syrupAfter the pears are lifted out, boil the syrup hard until it coats a spoon — roughly the consistency of warm honey. It will thicken further as it cools, so stop short of caramel or it will set stiff over the fruit.
- Serve coldThe recipe has the syrup boiled down, cooled, then strained and poured over the fruit only just before serving. Chill the pears and the syrup separately.
- Yield and costFive or six servings. The 1s 4d is a period retail figure and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
A compote is fruit cooked whole or in large pieces in sugar syrup and served in that syrup, distinguished in nineteenth-century kitchens from a marmalade or jam, which was cooked to a pulp and kept. The word comes into English from the French compote, itself from the same root as "composite" — something put together. The method is in any case a template: the same syrup, gentle simmer, reduction and cold-pouring sequence serves apricots, plums, apples or cherries, with the flavouring swapped. The choice offered here — lemon rind, vanilla or cloves — reflects what a well-stocked late-Victorian store cupboard held, vanilla still being sold in whole pods by the stick and used sparingly. The cochineal is the period's instinct for colour on the table: stewed pears turn a dull beige, and a tinted syrup may well have been felt to make the dish worth looking at.