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Compote of Rice and Pears
Cook and mould rice as for Compote of Rice with Peaches. Arrange on top quarters of cooked pears, and pour around pear syrup.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have the earlier Compote of Rice with Peaches open in front of you. That parent recipe is a mould of rice cooked soft in sweetened milk, so the whole dish depends on the rice being creamy and still able to hold a shape.
- What the base actually isThe parent recipe is a sweetened rice cooked soft, then pressed into a wet mould and chilled until firm. A short- or medium-grain rice is safest; long-grain releases less starch and parboiled rice less still, so either will set more loosely.
- MouldingRinse the mould with cold water and do not dry it, or turn the rice out onto a plate and shape it into a low dome with a wet spoon. Two to three hours in the refrigerator is enough for a 1-quart mould.
- The pearsPoach peeled, quartered, cored pears in a syrup of roughly 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water until a knife slides in with slight resistance, 10 to 20 minutes depending on ripeness. Bosc and Anjou hold their quarters; a ripe Bartlett can collapse in under 8 minutes.
- Pear syrupThe syrup poured around the base is the poaching liquid. Lift the pears out and boil it down by about half so it coats rather than floods the plate and softens the rice mould.
- Canned fruitCanned pears work here — drain them and reduce the packing syrup with a strip of lemon peel to give it some edge.
- TemperatureServe the rice cold and the pears cool or barely warm; hot fruit will soften the surface of a chilled mould.
- YieldA quart mould with 3 or 4 pears serves six as a light sweet course.
Compote is simply the French word for fruit stewed in syrup, and the word is often said to have named both the fruit and the dish it was served in. Cookbooks of the period give small families of these moulded rice compotes, one fruit after another, showing how such books economize throughout: state the technique once, then list what can be laid on top of it. Sweetened rice moulds were popular in this era partly because rice was cheap and kept well, and partly because the arrival of reliable canned and bottled fruit meant a cook could set out a fruit compote in February without apology.