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RHUBARB, COMPOTE OF (another way) (Boil in a clean preserving-pan)
Boil in a clean preserving-pan five or six ounces of good sugar with a quarter of a pint of spring water. Cut into inch lengths one pound of fresh rhubarb stalks, and simmer them gently in the syrup, skimming if necessary. Take rhubarb of the same growth that it may all be sufficiently tender at the same time. Time, ten minutes to boil syrup, about half an hour to simmer rhubarb.
A plain sugar-syrup compote from a British book, so the measures are imperial. The only real trap is the stated cooking time.
- The measuresA quarter of a pint in a British book is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. Five or six ounces of sugar is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup by volume — a firmly sweet syrup, appropriate to rhubarb's acidity but adjustable downward if your stalks are young.
- Half an hour is far too longHalf an hour is long -- Rhubarb cut into inch lengths softens quickly and can break down into strings and puree within roughly ten minutes of gentle simmering, though thick maincrop stalks take longer than thin forced ones. Cassell's timing suits a compote meant to be soft throughout; if you want the pieces to hold their shape, pull the pan off the heat as soon as a knife tip slides in with little resistance and let them finish in the residual heat of the syrup.
- Preserving-panA wide, unlined copper or heavy brass pan with a broad surface for evaporation. Any wide non-reactive pan works — stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Avoid bare aluminium or unlined iron, which react with rhubarb's acid and can give a metallic taste and grey colour.
- "Rhubarb of the same growth"Sound advice worth keeping. Thin early forced stalks and thick maincrop stalks cook at very different rates, so a mixed panful will be mush at one end and raw at the other. Sort by thickness before cutting if you cannot buy a single bunch.
- Boil the syrup firstThe ten-minute boil dissolves the sugar fully and concentrates the syrup slightly, so the rhubarb goes into a strong sugar solution rather than plain water, which is generally held to help the pieces stay intact rather than shedding water and disintegrating.
- SkimmingThe scum is froth and fine debris from the fruit, together with impurities carried in by the sugar. Lift it off with a spoon as it rises for a clear syrup; leaving it will not harm the flavour, only the look.
- LeavesUse stalks only. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid at levels high enough to be poisonous and should never go into the pan, even to bulk out a small quantity.
- Yield and servingOne pound of rhubarb serves three to four as a compote. Serve cold with cream, custard or a plain sponge; it keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator and the syrup thickens as it chills.
Rhubarb reached British kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as a fruit — the dried rhizome was an imported purgative traded through Russia and Turkey, and it is from that trade that the plant took its place in the pharmacopoeia. Culinary rhubarb, grown for its stalks, only became common in the nineteenth century, helped along by the forcing sheds of the West Riding of Yorkshire, where crowns were lifted, brought into dark heated buildings and made to produce pale, tender early stems. A compote — French in name, meaning fruit stewed whole or in pieces in syrup rather than reduced to a jam — was the standard way to handle a fruit too sour to eat raw and too watery to bake without thickening. Cassell's gives two versions, which tells you how firmly rhubarb had settled into the late-Victorian spring table, arriving as it does in the gap between the last stored apples and the first soft fruit.