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Compote of Grapes
Take a bunch or two of fine grapes, cut the stalks off, and make a little slit in each and pick out the stones with the point of a quill. Boil some syrup to the large pearl degree, put in the grapes and boil them up three or four times. When cold, skim off any scum that may have risen to the top. Arrange the grapes in a compotedish, and serve.
A short recipe that hinges entirely on sugar concentration and restraint: the grapes are warmed through in heavy syrup rather than cooked into jam.
- "Large pearl degree"An old French confectioner's stage, grand perlé, roughly 222-224F on a candy thermometer. That is a little above thread and just short of soft ball; the syrup surface shows fine bubbles that rise in beads.
- Syrup proportionsThe recipe assumes syrup is already to hand and gives no quantities. Something like 2 cups sugar to 1 cup water, boiled to the temperature above, will serve for a couple of bunches.
- Seeding without a quillThe recipe calls for the point of a quill to lift the pips out through a slit without tearing the grape. A bent paperclip, a small hairpin, or the tip of a paring knife does the same work.
- Choose the right grapesThe recipe presumes seeded dessert grapes with skins firm enough to survive the syrup, but names no variety. Modern seedless table grapes need no slitting at all, but they are thinner-skinned and slump faster, so give them less time in the pan.
- "Boil them up three or four times"This means bring the syrup back to a boil, draw the pan off the heat, let it subside, and repeat. The point is to drive syrup into the fruit gradually; a sustained boil bursts the skins and you get sauce.
- Compote-dishA footed glass or silver bowl, not a baking dish. Any shallow serving bowl works, and the grapes should sit in enough of their syrup to gloss them.
- Yield and servingGood as a dessert or as an accompaniment to cold poultry, game or a plain cream. Better cool than chilled hard, since cold mutes the fruit's perfume. The recipe gives no yield or keeping time.
Compotes -- fruit poached whole in sugar syrup rather than crushed into preserve -- were a fixture of the French dessert service that American luxury hotels adopted in the late nineteenth century, and the Waldorf cookery published under Oscar Tschirky's name (he was maître d'hôtel rather than chef) ran on that vocabulary. The instruction to boil syrup to the "large pearl degree" belongs to a pre-thermometer system in which cooks judged sugar by eye and by feel, naming each stage (thread, pearl, blow, feather, crack, caramel) after the way the boiling syrup or a drawn thread behaved.