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Orange Compote
6 oranges 1 pint of water 8 ounces of sugar Peel, and cut the oranges into rounds. Save all the juice, and put it, with some shreds of peel--no white, into the water with the sugar. Boil this for one hour to make a syrup, and pour over the rounds of oranges, and cool.
A plain fruit compote that depends entirely on two things: a syrup reduced far enough to have body, and orange rounds with no white pith left on them.
- The hinge: no whiteThe recipe's "no white" attaches to the shreds of peel: pith turns bitter as it sits in hot syrup, so pare the zest thinly with a vegetable peeler or zester. The oranges are peeled before slicing, and it is worth cutting away the white there too.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups (about 475 ml) if the book is American, 20 fl oz (about 570 ml) if it is imperial. Eight ounces of sugar is most likely a weight — about 1 1/8 cups granulated — though 8 fluid ounces, i.e. 1 cup, is not impossible.
- That one-hour boilAn hour at a hard boil will take the pint of water down a long way and may catch on the pan. Simmer instead, and judge by consistency: you want roughly half the liquid left, thick enough to coat a spoon lightly.
- Strain before pouringThe recipe leaves the peel in. Lift the shreds out if you want a clear syrup, or leave a few in for texture — but strain out any seeds and pulp that came along with the juice.
- Hot syrup, cold fruitPour the syrup over the rounds while it is hot so the fruit takes up some of it, then cool; it is better chilled before serving. Juice weeping from the slices will thin the syrup somewhat.
- Choosing orangesNavels are the easy choice — seedless and easy to cut into clean rounds. Blood oranges give a much better color. Whatever you use, six oranges yield 4 to 6 servings.
- KeepingCovered in the refrigerator this holds three or four days, though the rounds soften noticeably after the first day.
Compote — from the Old French composte, from Latin composita, "put together," the same root as English "compost" — meant fruit cooked or steeped in sugar syrup, a way of bringing fruit to a dessert table without pastry. Orange compote sits easily in a meatless cookbook: fruit, sugar and nothing else, at a time when so much of the dessert repertoire ran on suet, gelatine from calves' feet, or custards heavy with eggs and cream. A recipe can call for six oranges and treat the result as an everyday sweet rather than an occasion.