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RASPBERRIES, COMPOTE OF (another way)
Bruise a quart of sound raspberries thoroughly, put them into a glass dish, and sprinkle a pound of powdered sugar over them. Let them lie in a cool place for a couple of hours, then pour over them a quart of thin claret, and a quart of cold water. Send sponge-cake or any light cake to table with them. Time, two hours.
A no-cook compote in name only e the fruit is macerated rather than simmered. The proportions are Victorian, and the sugar in particular wants reconsidering before you commit a pound of it.
- QuartsCassell's is a British book, so a quart is 40 fl oz (1.14 litres), not the American 32. A quart of raspberries by volume is perhaps 1 1/2 lb of fruit, though it varies with the size of the berries; the liquid quarts are best read as roughly 4 to 5 cups each.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" means granulated sugar ground fine e what is now sold as caster sugar. It does not mean confectioner's sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the syrup.
- Cut the sugarA full pound to a quart of berries gives a syrup closer to cordial than compote, presumably suited to tarter fruit and sweeter tastes than ours. Start with 4 to 6 oz and taste after the maceration; you can always stir in more.
- Thin claretClaret is red Bordeaux; "thin" means light-bodied and low in tannin and alcohol. A young Merlot-based Bordeaux, a Beaujolais or any light unoaked red works. Avoid heavily oaked or high-alcohol wine, which turns harsh once diluted.
- The dilution is deliberateEqual parts wine and cold water sounds like a mistake but produces a drinkable, lightly alcoholic fruit soup rather than a boozy dessert. Serve it in shallow bowls with a spoon.
- Bruise, do not pur daePress the berries with the back of a spoon until they collapse and the juices run. Blitzing them gives a cloudy pulp that never clears and loses the whole seeded texture the dish depends on.
- Keep it cold"A cool place" means a larder; use the refrigerator for the two-hour maceration and chill the wine and water as well. Warm, it tastes flat and faintly cooked.
- YieldAbout 3 quarts of finished compote e enough for eight to ten servings. Sponge fingers, madeleines or plain pound cake all suit it; something dry enough to soak up the liquid.
Compotes traditionally involve fruit cooked in syrup, but by the late nineteenth century the word had loosened to cover any dish of whole or barely broken fruit sitting in a sweet liquid, cooked or not. This version belongs to a family of wine-and-fruit desserts that shade into drinks e close cousins of the German Kaltschale and of claret cup, the diluted wine punch that was a fixture of English summer entertaining. Claret held a particular place in Victorian British households, and the duty reductions of the early 1860s are often said to have made Bordeaux more affordable, though the social reach of that change is harder to document. The instruction to send sponge-cake to table alongside is characteristic of Cassell's, which routinely tells the cook what accompaniment the dish expects rather than assuming it.