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Compote of Oranges
Put the thin peel of eight oranges into a saucepan with one pound of sugar and three breakfast cupfuls of water and boil for twenty minutes, skimming frequently as the scum rises. Remove the white pith from the oranges, taking care not to injure the inner skin; pull them into quarters, add them to the syrup and simmer gently for six minutes longer. Take them out with a skimmer, arrange in a heap on a dish, keeping the skin-side downward; boil the syrup until quite thick, and when cold pour it over the oranges, and serve.
A candied-peel syrup poured over raw-ish orange segments — closer to a French compote than a stewed fruit. The whole dish depends on the six-minute simmer and on removing every scrap of white pith.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup and is usually reckoned at 8-10 fl oz, so three cupfuls is somewhere between 3 and 3 3/4 modern cups. Start with 3 cups (720 ml) to a pound of sugar (about 2 1/4 cups); you can add water if the syrup tightens too fast during the twenty-minute boil.
- "Thin peel" means zest onlyTake the coloured layer off with a vegetable peeler or a sharp swivel knife and leave the white behind. Any pith carried into the syrup turns the whole compote bitter, and pith on the segments is what makes the dish taste cheap.
- Six minutes, no moreThe segments are only being warmed through and glazed. Push them past this and the membranes slump and the fruit sheds juice into the syrup, which will then never thicken properly.
- SkimmingThe scum is impurities from the sugar together with peel debris; lifting it off is what keeps the finished syrup clear rather than cloudy.
- "Boil the syrup until quite thick"The book gives no temperature; reduce until a spoonful falling back into the pan leaves a visible trail. Under-reduced it runs off the fruit; taken much further it will stiffen towards candy as it cools.
- Pour it coldHot syrup would go on cooking the segments. Let it cool to room temperature, by which point it will be thick and slow-moving, then spoon it over the arranged fruit.
- Choosing orangesThick-skinned, seedless navels peel and quarter most cleanly. Eight oranges give a dessert for six to eight, and the candied peel left in the syrup can be lifted out, drained and used as a garnish.
Compotes — fruit held in a sugar syrup rather than cooked to a jam — were a fixture of the nineteenth-century dessert service, valued because they could be made hours ahead and sat handsomely on a footed dish, the sort of vessel a compotier named. The book belongs to the era when Florida and California citrus was reaching New York by rail in growing quantity, and oranges were moving from a seasonal luxury towards something a hotel could serve through the winter. Boiling the zest in the syrup before the fruit ever touches it draws on the peel, which carries most of the aromatic oil, and gives a syrup that tastes more strongly of orange than the juice alone would.