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Strawberries, Compote Of
Take a pint of freshly-gathered ripe strawberries. Pick them, and put them into a bowl. Pour over them a little clear syrup which has been made by boiling a quarter of a pint of water with five ounces of sugar for ten minutes. Cover the bowl containing them with a plate, and let them stand for an hour or more. Drain off the syrup; boil it for a few minutes, skim it, and strain it over the strawberries piled in the centre of a compote-dish. The flavour of this dish will be greatly improved if a wine-glassful of red currant juice is added to the syrup. When it is at hand, a glass of maraschino may also be added with advantage. For a superlative dish, the syrup, after being flavoured with maraschino or kirschenwasser, may be set in ice till it is almost frozen, and in this condition poured over the fruit. Time to soak the strawberries, one hour. Probable cost, strawberries, 4d. to 8d. per pound.
An uncooked strawberry compote, where the only heat goes into the syrup. The hinge is that the fruit never sees the stove.
- The measurementsA pint of strawberries here is a volume measure, very roughly 12 oz / 340 g of berries before hulling. A quarter pint of water is 5 fl oz (about 145 ml) in British measure; with 5 oz (140 g) sugar that gives a fairly heavy syrup.
- A wine-glassfulReckon about 2 fl oz (60 ml) for the currant juice. The recipe says only "a glass" of maraschino and does not specify the size; on the same reckoning that is a good deal of liqueur for a pint of fruit — start with half and taste.
- Boiling the syrup twiceTen minutes at a boil reduces 150 ml of water noticeably, so the syrup is thicker than a simple 1:1. The second boil after draining concentrates it further and drives off some of the liqueur; if you have used maraschino, add it after that second boil rather than before.
- Do not let the fruit cookThe syrup is poured over the berries while they sit cold, and the drained syrup is boiled without them. Returning the strawberries to the pan collapses them into jam and loses the whole point of the dish.
- Red currant juiceCrush fresh or thawed frozen red currants and strain; the acid and pectin sharpen a syrup that is otherwise flatly sweet. Bottled redcurrant cordial is sweetened and will need less sugar in the syrup.
- KirschenwasserKirsch, the clear cherry brandy. Interchangeable with maraschino here, though drier.
- "Set in ice till almost frozen"The recipe says only to set the syrup in ice. A shallow tray in the freezer for 30–40 minutes, stirred once or twice, gives the same slushy state — the alcohol keeps it from setting solid.
- YieldFour small servings, or two generous ones. Assemble within an hour of serving; the berries slacken and weep as they sit in syrup.
Compote in nineteenth-century English cookery meant fruit served in a syrup rather than in pastry or a mould, and the compote-dish — a shallow footed bowl, often glass — was a standard piece of dessert-service equipment, which the book assumes the reader owns. The insistence on "freshly-gathered" berries is practical rather than romantic: before refrigerated transport strawberries travelled badly, and the price note of 4d. to 8d. a pound suggests the swing between the height of the English season and its thin edges. Maraschino, then made at Zara on the Dalmatian coast from marasca cherries, and kirsch from the German and Alsatian cherry districts were both familiar bottles in a well-stocked Victorian store cupboard. The final variation, with the syrup half-frozen and poured over cold fruit, is a domestic echo of the elaborate iced dishes professional confectioners produced with ice-and-salt freezing mixtures in the same period.