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Compote of Lemons
Pare the lemons very thinly, turning them spirally, make some transverse incisions upon them, and cut out some fancy designs. Place the lemons in a saucepan with sufficient water to cover, and boil gently for about twenty minutes. Drain the lemons, put them into a sugar-boiler with some syrup, and let them simmer for about twenty minutes longer. At the end of that time put the lemons into a basin with the syrup, and leave them for several hours. When ready to serve, arrange them in a compote-dish and pour the syrup over them.
A whole-fruit compote of the old confectioner's school: lemons scored decoratively, blanched, then steeped in syrup until translucent. The original assumes you know what a syrup is and how strong to make it, so a few decisions are left to you.
- The syrup is unspecifiedOscar gives no proportions, and "some syrup" presumably assumes a stock syrup already to hand. A medium syrup of equal weights sugar and water is a reasonable reading; a heavier syrup is likely to candy the peel rather than poach it.
- Sugar-boilerA deep, unlined copper pan kept for sugar work. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan wide enough to hold the lemons in a single layer does the same job.
- Pare very thinlyBest read as taking only the yellow zest and leaving the white pith intact; the pith is presumably what holds the fruit together through the boiling and the simmer in syrup, and cutting into the flesh risks the lemons breaking up.
- Fancy designsThe transverse incisions and cut patterns can be made with a canelle knife or the point of a paring knife. Beyond the decorative effect, the cuts may also help the syrup penetrate the pith.
- Blanching and bitternessTwenty minutes in plain water draws out much of the bitterness. If the lemons are thick-skinned, change the water once partway through; thin-skinned supermarket lemons may soften in fifteen.
- The long rest matters more than the simmerMost of the work happens off the heat. Several hours in the warm syrup, or overnight, is what makes the pith translucent and sweet all the way through. Rushing it leaves a bitter core.
- Compote-dishA shallow footed glass or silver dish. Any shallow serving bowl works, but the lemons should sit in the syrup rather than swim in it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; allow roughly one lemon per person, served cool rather than chilled, with a spoonful of syrup and cream or a plain biscuit. It should keep for a few days refrigerated in its syrup.
Compotes of whole fruit in syrup belong to the confectioner's side of the nineteenth-century kitchen, descended from the French practice of compotes and preserved fruits served at the end of a formal dinner alongside ices and petits fours. Lemons are an unusual choice, and the recipe is really about technique: the ornamental paring, the patient blanching, the slow saturation of the pith. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, not the ranges, and his 1896 book gathers the working repertoire of a large hotel brigade, including a great many of these decorative dessert pieces. Candied and syruped citrus is often said, as a general matter, to have been valued as a way of keeping fruit through the winter, sugar doing the work that refrigeration later took over.