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Stewed Greengages
Select eighteen or twenty ripe greengages, cut them into halves, stone, and put them into a saucepan with a pint of cold water, adding half a pound of sugar. Place the pan on the stove, and when boiling, skim well. Cook for five minutes, stirring slowly from the bottom to avoid mashing the fruit; remove from the fire and immediately add one gill of red curacoa, mixing well together for about half a minute. Pour the whole into a bowl, let it get cool, turn it onto a dish, and serve.
A five-minute compote in a light syrup, finished off the heat with liqueur. Nearly everything depends on not overcooking the fruit.
- The hinge: five minutes and no moreGreengages are small and thin-skinned, and they collapse into jam quickly. Count the five minutes from the moment the syrup returns to a boil, stir with a spoon lifted from the bottom rather than folded through, and pull the pan while the halves still hold their shape.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is a generous amount of liqueur for a pound of fruit; a scant quarter cup still perfumes the syrup if you want the plums to lead.
- Red curaçaoA bitter-orange liqueur, in Oscar's day sold tinted red as well as clear, from the same base. Any orange curaçao or triple sec stands in; the colour was decorative. Adding it off the fire keeps the aromatics from cooking away.
- Finding greengagesReine Claude plums, sold under that name or as greengages at farm markets in late July and August, are the same fruit. Eighteen or twenty ripe ones is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb. Italian prune plums or small yellow plums substitute without much loss.
- The syrupHalf a pound of sugar is a generous cup, in a pint of water — a light syrup that will not set. It thins further as the fruit gives up juice, which is correct here; this is a compote, not a preserve.
- SkimmingLift the froth that rises at first boil off with a spoon, or the syrup may turn cloudy.
- "Turn it onto a dish"Cool in the bowl, then tip out into a shallow serving dish so the fruit sits in its syrup. Chilling for an hour or two is an improvement the original leaves unsaid.
- YieldFour to six servings as a dessert on its own, more alongside cream, a plain sponge or rice pudding.
The greengage is a green-ripening plum long grown in France as the Reine Claude, named for the queen consort of François I; the English name is generally traced to the Gage family of Suffolk, who are said to have introduced it to Britain in the early eighteenth century. In a hotel kitchen of Oscar Tschirky's era, stewed and syruped fruit like this was standard equipment — quick to assemble in season, held cold, and sent out as a light dessert or a garnish for creams and ices, with a liqueur added at the last second to give a plain dish a restaurant signature. The specific call for red curaçao is a period detail: liqueurs were routinely coloured for effect on the table, and the flush it gave a dish of pale green fruit may well have been the point.