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Compote of Greengages
Take about twenty large and perfectly sound greengages, wipe and put them in a copper sugar-boiler with half a pound of loaf-sugar and half a pint of water; when it has boiled, cover the pan, move it to the side of the fire, and simmer gently for ten minutes. Take out the greengages, strain the syrup, put it back in the sugar-boiler, and reduce to thirty degrees. Arrange the greengages tastefully in a compote dish and pour the syrup over them.
A plain fruit compote whose only real difficulty is the vocabulary: the sugar strength is given on a scale no home cook uses now, and the fruit itself has become hard to find.
- GreengagesA small green-gold dessert plum, honey-sweet and firm, sold briefly in late summer where it is grown at all. Any small, ripe but firm plum works; damsons need more sugar, Italian prune plums rather less.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in cones or hard blocks and broken up as needed, valued because it was the cleanest sugar available. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, half a pound being about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup by US measure (10 fl oz if the book is reckoning in imperial pints). With the half pound of sugar this is roughly equal parts sugar and water by weight, a medium syrup rather than a light one, in which the fruit poaches.
- Copper sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pan with sloping sides, used for its even heat and quick evaporation. A wide stainless or enamelled saucepan does the same job; avoid bare aluminium or unlined copper with acidic fruit.
- "Reduce to thirty degrees"Degrees Baume, the confectioner's measure of sugar density, read with a saccharometer. Thirty degrees Baume is a standard heavy syrup, in the region of 55 percent sugar; without a hydrometer, boil the strained syrup down only briefly, until it is slightly thickened, well short of any caramel colour.
- "Move it to the side of the fire"On a coal range the pan was slid off the hot centre to a cooler zone. Translate as the lowest possible burner setting; the liquid should barely tremble.
- The hinge: ten minutes is a maximumRipe plums go to mush and shed their skins fast. Start checking at five minutes and lift them out the moment a skewer meets no resistance; they finish cooking in the residual heat of the syrup.
- Yield and servingTwenty plums serve four to six. Cool the fruit and syrup separately, pour over shortly before serving, and offer cream or a plain sponge alongside; it keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator.
The greengage is a cultivar of Prunus domestica whose English name is traditionally traced to Sir William Gage, in whose early eighteenth-century garden the French Reine Claude was said to have been grown after its labels went missing; the French name honours Claude of France, queen to Francois I. The instruction reads like a professional's shorthand: a copper sugar-boiler, a saccharometer, and a syrup specified by density rather than by time. That the recipe assumes a Baume hydrometer on the bench says more about the kitchen it came from than any of its ingredients.