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Apricots with Cream
Peel and cut eighteen fresh, sound ripe apricots in halves, remove stones, then slice and place on a compotier, sprinkle over two tablespoons powdered sugar, mix well; beat up one and a half gills cream until thick but not frothy, mix well, pour it over apricots and serve.
A three-ingredient dessert that lives or dies on the fruit. Everything else here is a matter of translating the old measures and vessels.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup (180 ml).
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit, the same vessel used for stewed compotes. Any shallow serving bowl works; something wide keeps the sliced fruit from crushing under its own weight.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered" usually means finely ground granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster or superfine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster dissolves into the fruit juices without clouding the cream.
- Peeling apricotsRipe apricots do not peel cleanly with a knife. A 20-30 second dip in boiling water followed by cold water slips the skins, or simply leave them on.
- "Thick but not frothy"This is the hinge. Beat the cream only to soft, drooping peaks so it pours and coats; taken further it becomes a stiff whipped topping that sits on the fruit instead of running through it.
- Sugar and standing timeSprinkling the sugar and mixing draws juice out of the apricots within ten or fifteen minutes. Dress the fruit shortly before serving, or the cream will be thinned by a pool of syrup at the bottom of the dish.
- YieldEighteen apricots serve six generously, four if the dessert is the whole course. Scale the cream at about 2 tablespoons per three apricots.
- Fruit qualityThere is no cooking to rescue underripe fruit. Apricots should smell fragrant and yield to a thumb; supermarket fruit picked hard is better poached in syrup and used in another recipe.
Apricots with cream comes from the long tail of simple fruit desserts that closed a formal meal in the American and Anglo-French dining rooms of the early 1900s, when a compotier of dressed seasonal fruit was considered a proper sweet and not a shortcut. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, compiled his international collection at a time when apricots were a brief early-summer luxury in the eastern United States, some of them shipped from California after the transcontinental rail trade in fresh fruit developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The instruction to beat the cream "thick but not frothy" may reflect a distinction some cooks of the period seem to have observed: lightly beaten cream to pour over fruit, fully whipped cream for charlottes and molded creams. The apricot itself is generally traced to China and reached Europe through Persia and the Roman world, which is why its French name, abricot, and the English word both come down through Arabic al-barquq, itself a borrowing of Latin praecoquum.