Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Compote of Pineapple
Compote of Pineapple
Peel a pineapple and cut it in slices about one-fourth inch the thickness. Cut all the slices in halves with the exception of the middle one which should be left whole. Put them in a sugar-boiler with some syrup at 20 degrees, and let them simmer gently at the side of the fire for an hour. Put the pineapple into a basin, pour the syrup over and let it steep for twenty hours. At the end of that time, put the slices on a wire-drainer, strain the syrup through a silk-sieve into a sugar-boiler and boil till reduced to 32 degrees. Arrange the half slices of pineapple in the center of a compote-dish, put the round slice on the top, pour the syrup over, and serve.
A professional confectioner's method written in Baumé degrees, which is the only genuinely obscure thing about it. Everything else is a slow poach and a long soak.
- Syrup at 20 degreesDegrees Baumé, read with a syrup hydrometer, not a thermometer. Twenty degrees is roughly 35 percent sugar by weight: about 1 cup sugar dissolved in 1½ cups water will land close enough.
- Reduced to 32 degreesThat is a heavy syrup, near 58-60 percent sugar, thick enough to coat a spoon. Without a hydrometer or refractometer, boil until it reaches about 217-219F and no higher.
- Sugar-boilerAn unlined copper pan. Any wide, heavy stainless or copper saucepan works; wide matters more than the metal, since you are reducing by evaporation.
- At the side of the fireA coal range had hot and cool zones. This means the barest simmer, surface barely trembling, on your lowest burner or with a diffuser. Hard boiling will collapse the slices.
- Silk-sieveA fine silk straining cloth. Line a sieve with a double layer of damp muslin or a coffee filter; the point is a clear, particle-free syrup for glazing.
- The twenty-hour steepThis is the hinge. The long cold soak is what drives sugar into the fruit so the slices stay firm and translucent instead of going woolly. Refrigerate it, covered, rather than leaving it on the counter.
- Choosing the pineappleA ripe fruit with a fragrant base. Core the slices before poaching if the center is fibrous.
- YieldServes four to six as a light dessert. The reduced syrup keeps for a couple of weeks refrigerated and is worth saving.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the century, and this entry is pure French confiserie practice transplanted to the Waldorf: candying by degrees Baumé, measured with a hydrometer floated in the syrup, was standard in professional pastry departments at a time when household cooks were generally still working without thermometers. A compote in this sense is fruit cooked and served in its own syrup; the name belongs to the preparation itself, from the French composte and ultimately Latin composita, and the footed glass or silver compote dish takes its name from the food rather than the reverse. Fresh pineapple is often said to have been a display item in American dining rooms of the 1890s, expensive and associated with hospitality, and treating it this deliberately, whole center slice crowning the arrangement, was as much about presentation on the sideboard as flavor.