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Compote of Hazel Nuts
After cracking, carefully remove the kernels from some freshly gathered hazel nuts; put them on a dish, squeeze over a few drops of lemon juice, and leave them for an hour or two. Drain the nuts free from the juice, arrange them in a pyramid in a compote-dish, pour over thick syrup flavored with noyeau, and serve.
A three-line dessert that depends entirely on the quality of two things: the nuts and the syrup. Everything else is assembly.
- "Freshly gathered" means wet hazelnuts"Freshly gathered" nuts -- The phrase points to nuts fresh from the tree, which in early autumn are still green or "wet": milky and crisp rather than dry and oily. Dried supermarket hazelnuts will work but taste and behave differently; if using them, blanch briefly in boiling water and rub off the papery skins, which are bitter.
- Why the lemon juiceThe recipe does not say; the likeliest effect of an hour or two in a few drops of lemon is to keep the pale kernels bright and to sharpen the flavour against the sugar. It is not a marinade — drain the nuts properly or the syrup will thin and taste sour.
- Thick syrupA heavy sugar syrup, boiled down until it is visibly thick rather than watery; a ratio of roughly two parts sugar to one part water is a workable modern starting point. Letting it cool before pouring avoids softening the nuts.
- NoyeauOscar's spelling of noyau — crème de noyaux, a sweet liqueur traditionally flavoured with stone-fruit kernels and tasting of marzipan. Modern bottlings are scarce; amaretto or a good almond liqueur gives the intended almond-cherry note. Add it to the syrup off the heat so the alcohol and aroma survive.
- Compote-dishA footed glass or silver bowl. The pyramid is the presentation: nuts mounded high, with the syrup poured over just before service so it has not pooled and dulled.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. About 2 cups of shelled kernels and a cup of syrup would serve roughly six as a light course after a rich dinner.
- Serve promptlyNuts left sitting in syrup soften and go slick. Shell, macerate and mound ahead; syrup at the last moment.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at a moment when a formal American dinner still closed the way a French one did — with fruit, nuts and a sweetened liqueur rather than a plated pastry. A compote in this sense is simply fruit or nuts under syrup, and the hazelnut version is often said to belong to the brief autumn window when green cobnuts reached the market; the effect depends on the nut being fresh enough to taste of milk rather than oil. The flavouring, noyau, was a nineteenth-century staple made from fruit stones, traditionally associated with Martinique and with French confectionery, and it turns up in period cookbooks where an almond note was wanted without almonds. That a dish this plain earned a place in a Waldorf collection says something about the era's confidence in raw material: the cook's whole contribution here is choosing the nuts and boiling the sugar correctly.