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Compote of Strawberries
Select some fine ripe strawberries, carefully pick off the stems, drop them one by one into some syrup boiled to 22 degrees, and allow them to just simmer; then pour them carefully into a basin, and leave until cold. Arrange the strawberries in the form of an elevated cone in a compote-dish, pour the syrup round, and serve them.
A professional pastry formula compressed into four lines. Everything depends on the syrup density and on how little the berries are cooked.
- "Syrup boiled to 22 degrees"This is a hydrometer reading, most likely degrees Baume, taken with a saccharometer of the kind used in professional pastry work. On that scale it indicates a light-to-medium syrup, in the region of 40 percent sugar by weight; roughly 1 lb sugar to about 1 1/2 pints (3 cups) water, brought to a boil, is the right neighbourhood. Since the same figure could be read on a Brix scale, which would give a much lighter syrup, the original is genuinely ambiguous and no exact conversion can be claimed.
- The hinge: barely simmer"Just simmer" means seconds, not minutes. Slide the berries into syrup held just below a boil, let them heat through until the surface trembles, and take the pan off at once. Any real boiling and the fruit slumps into jam.
- Cooling in the syrupPouring into a basin and leaving until cold is the actual cooking. The berries continue to absorb syrup as the temperature drops, which is what firms and glazes them. Do not drain them warm.
- Choosing the fruitSmall, firm, fully red berries of even size hold their shape and stack into the cone. Large modern hollow-centred strawberries collapse; halve nothing, and discard any that are soft at the tip.
- "Compote-dish"A footed glass or silver bowl on a short stem. Any shallow-sided bowl works, but the cone needs a flat centre to build on, so a wide dish beats a deep one.
- Building the coneLift the berries out with a slotted spoon and drain them a moment before piling them, stem-scar down, in a pyramid. Pour the cold syrup around the base rather than over the top, or the structure washes down.
- Yield and servingThe recipe specifies no quantities; about 1 1/2 lb berries with the syrup above would serve four to six. Serve cold the same day; kept overnight the fruit tends to go limp and the syrup thin.
A compote in the nineteenth-century sense is not the loose stewed fruit of a modern breakfast table but a set piece: whole fruit poached in graduated sugar syrup, cooled in it, and built into an architectural shape for the dessert service. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, belongs to the same world of brief pastry-department notes, in which the syrup is specified by hydrometer degree and the fruit by nothing at all -- the man reading it had a saccharometer at his elbow and knew what a ripe strawberry looked like. The habit of measuring sugar syrups by density is generally traced to the French confectioners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who worked through a named ladder of stages from thread to caramel; the Baume hydrometer offered a separate way of reading a syrup, by density rather than by boiling stage. Strawberries belong at the delicate end of the range because they cannot take heat, making the dish a test of restraint rather than skill.