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Compote of Cherries
Cut off the stems from one pound of cherries to about three-quarters of an inch in length. Then put one-half pound of sugar in a sugar-boiler and add two quarts of water. Boil for three minutes; then put in the cherries, place the cover on the boiler and boil for five minutes longer. Remove the cherries, put them on a strainer and let them drain; then place them on a compote-dish with the stalks sticking up. Reduce the syrup to 30 degrees, and after it is cool, pour it over the cherries, and serve.
A simple poached-fruit dessert whose only real puzzle is the instruction to reduce the syrup "to 30 degrees." That figure is a hydrometer reading, not a temperature.
- "Thirty degrees" means BauméThe classic French sirop à 30 degrés is measured with a saccharometer, not a thermometer: about 1.26 specific gravity, roughly 56-58 percent sugar. Without a hydrometer, reduce until the syrup coats a spoon and feels distinctly viscous but has taken no colour.
- The water quantity is deliberate, and awkwardThe water quantity is awkward -- Half a pound of sugar in two quarts of water is a very thin bath, which will poach the cherries gently rather than candy them. Reducing that much liquid back to a heavy syrup takes a long spell of hard boiling. Poach in the dilute syrup, then pour off and reduce it in a wide pan to speed things along.
- Sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pan, standard equipment in a hotel pastry room. Any heavy non-reactive saucepan works; avoid bare aluminium, which dulls the colour of red fruit.
- Five minutes is the outside limitRipe sweet cherries may split and slump well before the five minutes are up. Keep the liquid below a rolling boil and pull them the moment they yield to a skewer.
- The stems are the pointLeaving three-quarters of an inch of stalk and standing the fruit upright is presentation, not technique. It also means the cherries are unpitted, so warn anyone at the table.
- Compote-dishA footed glass or silver bowl, shallow and wide. Any low serving bowl will do, but the fruit should sit in a single layer or the stems will not stand.
- Cool the syrup fullyHot syrup poured over drained cherries continues to cook them and turns the flesh woolly. Let it come to room temperature first, then chill the finished dish.
- YieldOne pound of cherries serves four as a light dessert, or two if it is the whole course. Surplus syrup keeps for a while refrigerated and is useful for soaking sponge cake.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel from 1893, compiled his 1896 book largely from the hotel's French kitchen practice, and this is a textbook compote in the Carême-to-Escoffier line: whole fruit poached in light syrup, then dressed with syrup reduced to a set density. The vocabulary gives it away — the sugar-boiler, the compote-dish, and above all the reading of thirty degrees Baumé, the pastry cook's standard stock syrup, named for the eighteenth-century French chemist whose hydrometer scale was still the working measure in professional kitchens well into the twentieth century. Cherries had a short, sharp season in the northeastern United States, and a dish like this, with the stalks left on and the fruit standing upright in a footed dish, was a way of announcing early summer.