Dried Fruit
All dried fruit should be washed well in warm water. Soak in cold water until plump in appearance. Some dried fruit should be left in water overnight and cooked in water in which they are soaked until tender. Sweeten to taste and simmer five minutes. Serve hot or cold. Prunes should be soaked several hours before cooking. Cook dried plums, peaches, apples and apricots same way.
This is a method rather than a fixed recipe, and it still works. The one thing to hold onto: sweeten only near the end, after the fruit has gone tender.
- Why sugar goes in lastSugar added to the soaking or early simmering water draws moisture out of the fruit and keeps the skins tough. Cook the fruit soft in plain water first, then sweeten and give it the five minutes called for so the syrup thickens slightly.
- Keep the soaking waterThe instruction to cook the fruit in the water it soaked in is deliberate — sugars, acids and colour leach out during soaking. Pouring it off and starting fresh gives a flatter, paler compote.
- Modern fruit needs far less soakingDried fruit sold today is usually partly hydrated and packed moist, so the overnight soak this book assumes is rarely necessary. One to two hours covers most fruit; hard, leathery pieces from a bulk bin may want longer.
- Times by fruitOnce plumped, apples and apricots usually simmer tender in roughly 10 to 15 minutes, peaches and plums 15 to 20, prunes 20 to 30 depending on size and how dry they were to start. Pitted prunes generally cook faster than unpitted.
- PrunesModern pitted prunes are soft enough that the several hours specified here can be cut to about an hour, or skipped entirely if you simmer them a little longer. Do not boil hard — the skins split and the flesh shreds.
- Sulfured and unsulfuredSulfur dioxide was and is used on dried apricots and apples to prevent oxidative browning, which is why sulfured apricots stay bright orange and sulfured apples stay light. Unsulfured fruit is brown and cooks to a darker, more caramel-tasting compote; both are fine, but do not expect bright orange apricots from unsulfured stock.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. A pound of mixed dried fruit with water to cover generously will serve about six, and takes something like a third to a half cup of sugar, tasted as you go.
- Worth addingA strip of lemon peel, a piece of cinnamon stick or two cloves in the simmering water costs nothing and lifts what is otherwise a very plain sweet stew. Serve hot with cream, or chilled with the syrup as a breakfast dish.