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Compote of Pears with Maraschino
Open a pint can preserved pears, drain the syrup into a saucepan and arrange the pears on a compotier dish. Add one ounce of sugar, a tablespoon maraschino and a vanilla bean to the syrup, let reduce on the fire to half the quantity, then strain the syrup over the pears and serve. (Wipe the vanilla bean and put back in the sugar for further use.)
A five-minute dessert built on canned pears; the only real work is reducing the syrup, and the only real risk is reducing it too far.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for serving fruit. Any shallow bowl works, but a stemmed one keeps the pears above the syrup pooling below.
- A pint canRoughly 16 fl oz, which today means a standard 15-oz can of pear halves in syrup. Buy pears in heavy or light syrup, not in juice or water, or there is nothing to reduce.
- One ounce of sugarWeight, not volume: about 2 tablespoons. If your pears are packed in heavy syrup, cut this to a teaspoon or the finished sauce will be cloying.
- The hingeReduce to half and stop there. Taken much further the syrup thickens quickly and turns sticky and over-sweet as it cools on the cold fruit, so it is worth watching.
- MaraschinoThe clear Italian cherry-kernel liqueur (Luxardo, Maraska), not the red juice from a jar of cocktail cherries. Add it with the sugar as the original says; some of the alcohol will cook off during the reduction.
- Vanilla beanThe recipe uses a whole bean and gets only a brief infusion from it; wipe it dry afterwards, as directed, and return it to the sugar jar. A bean survives several such uses.
- ServingStrain the syrup over the pears and serve; the syrup thickens further as it cools. One can serves two, three at a stretch.
Compote in French cookery means fruit cooked or served in syrup, and by the time this book was written the canned version had become a legitimate shortcut rather than an embarrassment: commercial fruit canning was industrial in scale by the 1900s, and hotel and restaurant kitchens are often said to have relied on it for entremets and quick sweets. Maraschino, distilled in Dalmatia from Marasca cherries with their kernels, was a standard bar and pastry liqueur of the period and turns up constantly in fruit compotes, punches and ices; the sweet dyed cherry that now carries its name is a later American substitute for fruit actually steeped in the liqueur. The parenthetical instruction to wipe the vanilla bean and bury it back in the sugar is the most telling line here he recrecipe's own economy suggests vanilla was expensive enough that one pod might be expected to work several times over and to perfume the sugar bin in between.