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Pineapple, Compote Of
Peel a pineapple, and pick all the specks or eyes from it; cut it into slices half an inch thick, keep one of the largest of these whole, and divide the rest into halves. Make some syrup by boiling five ounces of lump sugar in half a pint of water for ten minutes, put in the slices of fruit, and let them boil for five minutes. Leave them in the syrup until they are quite cold; drain them; put the whole slice in the centre of a compote-dish, and arrange the half slices in a circle round it; pour the syrup over, and serve. Time to boil the syrup, ten minutes; with the fruit, five minutes. Probable cost, pineapples, when very cheap, 1s. to 2s. each. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A plain sugar-syrup compote that depends entirely on the fruit. The whole method is five minutes of poaching and then patience while it cools in its own syrup.
- The measurementsFive ounces of lump sugar is about 2/3 cup granulated; lump sugar was simply refined sugar sold in solid cones or cubes and has no special property here. Half a pint in this book is an Imperial half pint, 10 fl oz, so use 1 1/4 cups of water.
- Core the slicesThe recipe says to remove the eyes but says nothing about the fibrous core, which stays woody however long it poaches. Stamp it out of each slice with a small cutter, or leave the rings whole for a better-looking dish.
- Five minutes is rightPineapple collapses quickly in hot syrup. Half-inch slices want a bare simmer for about five minutes so they turn translucent at the edge but still hold their shape when lifted; a hard rolling boil will shred them.
- The cooling is the recipeLeaving the fruit in the syrup until cold is what sweetens it through and firms it. Rushing this step gives you sharp, watery pineapple in thin syrup. Overnight in the refrigerator is better still.
- Ripeness matters more than anythingA hard, underripe supermarket pineapple will stay acidic and slightly astringent. Choose one that smells sweet at the base and gives slightly to pressure; if it is on the sour side, add another ounce of sugar to the syrup.
- Reducing the syrupAfter draining, the syrup will be thin. Boil it down by a third and cool it again before pouring over if you want it to coat the fruit rather than pool.
- Do not set it with gelatineRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine, but the five-minute boil here destroys it. If you want to build this into a jelly, use the cooked fruit and cooked syrup only.
- Yield and servingTwo or three portions as written, from a single pineapple; the recipe does not specify a size. A "compote-dish" is a shallow footed glass or china bowl; any wide shallow dish shows the ring arrangement to the same effect. Serve cold, with cream or a plain sponge finger.
Compote, from the same root as the English word compost, means simply fruit cooked and kept in syrup, and by the nineteenth century it commonly described whole or barely divided fruit poached gently so it holds its shape, then arranged in a footed dish under its own syrup, as against the deliberately broken-down stewed fruit of the nursery. The price note -- "pineapples, when very cheap, 1s. to 2s. each" -- belongs to a period when the fruit was becoming less rare, though 1s. to 2s. was still a serious sum in most households. For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries British pineapples were grown at great expense in heated pits and hothouses on large estates, and it is often said, on largely anecdotal evidence, that they were hired out as centrepieces rather than eaten; faster steamships and expanding cultivation in the Azores and the West Indies brought imports steadily down in price over the second half of the century. That a general-purpose dictionary of cookery could treat a pineapple as an occasional cheap fruit, sufficient for two or three persons, is a small marker of that change.