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Compote of Figs
Put in a basin the required quantity of figs with the juice and peel of one or two lemons; pour over sufficient boiling water to cover and leave until cold. For every two pounds of fruit, put in a preserving-pan half a pound of granulated sugar and one pint of water, boil until the sugar is dissolved, then drain the figs and put them in the syrup with one thinly-sliced lemon without seeds, and simmer gently until tender. Leave the figs in the syrup until cold, then group them in the center of a glass dish, pour the syrup over, and serve.
Compote of Fruits with Iced Champagne Select two fine cooking-pears, peel, core and cut in quarters, and put them in a sugar-boiler with syrup at sixteen degrees and sufficient prepared cochineal to make the pears a good pink; then take two large cooking-apples, peel, core and cut in quarters and put them in a sugar-boiler with syrup at sixteen degrees, and cook some stoned greengages in the same way; when all the fruits are ready, put them on a wire-sieve to drain until cold. Pour half a bottle of champagne in a freezer, together with one teacupful of syrup at thirty degrees, and let it freeze. Arrange the cold fruit in a compote dish, pour over the frozen champagne and syrup, and serve.
Two dishes run together here: a plain fig compote, and a fruit compote buried under frozen champagne. Both are straightforward once the period shorthand is decoded.
- Which figsAlmost certainly dried figs: the recipe does not say, but a boiling-water-and-lemon soak left until cold reads as a rehydration step, and fresh figs would collapse under it. Use whole dried figs, stems trimmed. Fresh figs need only a few minutes in the finished syrup, no soaking at all.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy pan. Any wide stainless or enamelled pan works; width matters more than material because it lets the syrup reduce without the fruit stacking up.
- Syrup ratio for the figsHalf a pound of sugar to a pint of water is about 1 cup sugar to 2 cups liquid — a light syrup by modern standards. It thickens as the figs give up their own sugar, and the sliced lemon supplies pectin and body.
- Simmer, do not boilThe hinge of the fig compote. Figs held at a bare simmer stay whole and glossy; a rolling boil splits the skins and pulls the seeds loose into the syrup. Twenty to forty minutes depending on how dry the figs were.
- Syrup "at sixteen degrees"Degrees Baume, read with a saccharometer. Sixteen degrees is roughly a 30 percent sugar solution — about 1 cup sugar dissolved in 2 cups water. Thirty degrees is a heavy syrup, closer to equal weights of sugar and water. The readings are approximate conversions; without a hydrometer, treat them as light and heavy syrup.
- CochinealCarmine, the red extract of the cochineal insect, sold then as a liquid colouring. It is still a permitted food colour, though it is now labelled and avoided by many; a little cranberry or hibiscus in the poaching syrup tints pears the same pink.
- GreengagesA small green-gold plum, in season briefly in late summer and rare in American markets. Any firm, tart plum stands in. "Stoned" simply means pitted.
- FreezerA hand-cranked ice-cream freezer. Champagne with that much added syrup will not set solid — it freezes to a coarse slush. In a home freezer, pour it into a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every twenty minutes for a granita texture, then spoon it over the cold fruit at the last possible moment.
- YieldTwo pounds of figs serves six to eight. The champagne compote, from two pears, two apples and a few plums, serves four to six and must be assembled and carried to the table immediately.
A compote is simply fruit cooked whole or in pieces in sugar syrup and served in its own liquid — one of the oldest sweet courses in the French repertoire, and by the 1890s a fixture on hotel menus because it could be made in quantity a day ahead and held cold. The Waldorf's recipes, of which Oscar Tschirky was the hotel's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, follow long-standing French professional practice, which is why the syrups are specified by Baume degree rather than by cup: a professional pastry department measured density with a hydrometer as a matter of course. The dried figs point to the Smyrna and Mediterranean trade that supplied American groceries year-round, while the champagne granita over poached fruit is pure late-Victorian hotel theatre — the same impulse that produced sorbets served mid-meal. Cochineal, used here to make pears an assertive pink, was the standard red of the period kitchen, and the pale poached fruit of the era was often tinted.