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Rice with Apple Compote
3 1/2 cups sugar 2 1/2 cups water 6 apples 4 slices lemon 2 cups cooked rice Cook sugar and water together ten minutes. Pare, core and cut apples in thick, round slices. Add lemon slices to syrup and cook apples, a few slices at a time, until all are cooked. Arrange rice in bottom of serving dish. Arrange slices of apples overlapping each other on top of rice. Boil the syrup until thick and pour over apples. Cool and serve. Pears, peaches or oranges may be substituted for apples. Serves 6.
A poached-fruit compote set over a bed of rice, in the style of the old French pommes Condé. The syrup is the whole technique here, and it is far sweeter than a modern cook would expect.
- The syrup is very heavy3 1/2 cups sugar to 2 1/2 cups water is a rich syrup, meant to glaze the fruit and set to a lacquer as it cools. Halving the sugar gives a lighter compote but the finished dish will stay loose rather than glossy.
- Poach in batches, and mean itCooking "a few slices at a time" keeps the syrup at temperature and lets the rings hold their shape. Crowding the pan drops the heat, the apples release water, and they collapse into sauce.
- Apple choiceUse a firm variety that holds together when poached — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith. Modern soft supermarket apples such as McIntosh will break down within a couple of minutes.
- Judging the thick syrupAfter the fruit comes out, reduce the syrup until it thickens; on a candy thermometer that is around 230-235F. Take it much past that and it will set noticeably harder on the cold fruit rather than coating it.
- The rice"Cooked rice" here means plain boiled white rice, not a sweetened pudding. Short or medium grain gives a base that holds the fruit; long grain stays loose and slides apart under the slices. Two cups cooked is roughly 2/3 cup raw.
- Lemon slicesThey are there for acid to balance the sugar and to keep the fruit pale. Lift them out before arranging the apples, or they turn bitter as the syrup reduces.
- SubstitutionsPears behave like apples. Peaches need only a minute or two and are best peeled; orange segments should be warmed in the syrup off the heat rather than boiled.
- ServingServes 6 as written. It is intended to be served cool, not chilled hard — cold dulls the syrup and stiffens the rice.
The combination of a rice base, poached fruit fanned over the top and a reduced syrup poured on is the shape of the French dessert Condé, generally traced to the classical repertoire of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking, where a mould of sweetened rice was crowned with apricots, pears or apples and glazed with their syrup. By the time this book was printed the dish had been stripped down for the household kitchen: no mould, no egg-enriched rice, just plain boiled rice in the bottom of a serving dish.