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Compote of Apricots
Open a pint can fine, firm apricots. Place on a compote dish and their liquor in a small saucepan; pour two tablespoons maraschino with a tablespoon fine sugar into the liquor and boil on the range for five minutes; pour over the apricots and serve.
A three-minute dessert built on canned fruit and a bottle of liqueur. The only real work is reducing the syrup so it clings rather than pooling.
- The canA "pint can" of apricots is roughly 16 oz, close to today's standard 15-15.5 oz can of halves in syrup. Figure two to four servings; the recipe itself does not say.
- Drain thoroughlyLift the halves out with a slotted spoon and let them sit a moment on the dish before the syrup goes on. Carrying over a spoonful of thin canning liquid dilutes the glaze you just spent five minutes making.
- MaraschinoThis means the clear Italian cherry liqueur (Luxardo, Maraska), not the pink juice from a jar of cocktail cherries. Substituting the latter gives a candy-sweet syrup with none of the dry, almond-edged bite the recipe is after.
- Boil hard, and watch itBoil and watch it -- Five minutes at a steady boil in a small pan will reduce the canning liquor appreciably. A wide pan reduces much faster and can catch and scorch, so use a small saucepan and pull it when it coats a spoon.
- Sugar is optionalCanned apricots in heavy syrup need no help. "Fine sugar" is caster or superfine; if your fruit is packed in juice or light syrup, add it, otherwise leave it out.
- Alcohol stays inTwo tablespoons boiled five minutes will lose some but not all of its alcohol. Worth knowing if serving to anyone who avoids it.
- TemperatureThe syrup is poured hot over cool fruit and served at once, which is the point of the dish. Chilling the compote afterwards is fine, but the syrup will thicken further and turn tacky.
- Compote dishA footed glass or silver bowl, shallow and wide. Any shallow serving bowl works; the fruit should lie in a single layer so the syrup reaches all of it.
Commercial canning of California apricots expanded sharply in the decades either side of 1900, and cookbooks of the period are full of dishes that take tinned fruit and dress it up with liqueur, whipped cream or a boiled syrup so that it can appear at a formal table without apology. Compote here carries its older French sense of fruit served in syrup rather than the stewed, spooned-over-porridge sense it has drifted toward in English. Maraschino, distilled in Dalmatia from marasca cherries and their crushed stones, turns up in trifles, fruit cups and punches of the period.