Home › A Cluster of Berries › Cranberry Compote
Cranberry Compote
Make a heavy syrup as for Cranberry Syrup and place in this (while boiling) a quart of cranberries which have been pricked with a coarse needle (twice). Cook the berries and syrup together till syrup is very thick, when remove and serve cold.
A two-ingredient recipe whose whole character depends on keeping the berries whole in a syrup thick enough to set around them. The pricking is not decorative.
- Why prick the berriesCranberry skins are tough and airtight; heated whole they burst and collapse into sauce. Two punctures with a coarse needle let steam escape gradually so the fruit stays intact and takes up syrup. Skip this step and you have cranberry sauce, not a compote.
- The missing syrupThe recipe leans on the book's Cranberry Syrup for the "heavy syrup," so no ratio is given here. Definitions of a "heavy" syrup varied a good deal; somewhere between one and two parts sugar to one part water is a reasonable starting point if you are working without the companion recipe, not a fixed rule.
- A quart of cranberriesA quart of whole berries is about 1 lb, or four cups. The usual supermarket bag is 12 oz, so you need one and a third bags.
- Heat managementAdd the berries to syrup that is boiling but then drop to a bare simmer. A rolling boil agitates the fruit and tears it open however carefully you pricked it.
- Judging "very thick"Cranberries are high in pectin and the syrup will thicken from the fruit as well as from evaporation. Ten to fifteen minutes at a simmer is usually enough; test by cooling a spoonful on a cold plate, since the syrup sets noticeably as it drops in temperature.
- Cooling and keepingCool in the cooking vessel so the berries continue to absorb syrup, then refrigerate. It keeps a week or more covered, and the syrup will firm up further overnight.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly a pint and a half. Good as a relish beside roast poultry, game or ham, or served cold on its own or over rice pudding or plain cake.
The cranberry of this recipe is Vaccinium macrocarpon, a North American bog plant that was gathered wild long before it was farmed; commercial cultivation on Cape Cod is generally traced to the early nineteenth century, and by the time books like this one appeared the fruit arrived in barrels and kept for months in a cool cellar, which is much of why it turns up so often in winter cookery. "Compote" is borrowed from the French, where it means fruit kept whole or nearly whole in syrup, as distinct from a sauce or a jam — hence the fussy business with the needle, which exists only to preserve the shape of the berry. The cross-reference to Cranberry Syrup is typical of household books of the period: one preparation supplies the base for the next, and the reader is assumed to have read the preceding page.