Home › The World's Kitchen › Compote of Pears
Compote of Pears
Open a pint can of preserved pears. Arrange them on a compotier. Pour the syrup into a small saucepan with a teaspoon vanilla essence, one ounce sugar and half a cinnamon stick; let boil for ten minutes, remove the cinnamon, pour the syrup over the pears and serve.
A five-minute dessert built on a can of pears, of the sort that filled the back pages of pre-war cookbooks. The only real technique is the syrup reduction, and the one change worth making is when the vanilla goes in.
- Vanilla last, not firstVanilla essence boiled for ten minutes loses most of its aroma to the steam. Reduce the syrup with the sugar and cinnamon, take the pan off the heat, then stir the vanilla in.
- A compotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit and preserves, standard on a Victorian and Edwardian table. Any shallow bowl with a rim to hold the syrup works; the pears are meant to be seen.
- An ounce of sugarAbout 2 tablespoons, by weight roughly 30 g. Canned pears in heavy syrup are already sweet, so taste before you add all of it.
- Pint canA US pint is 16 fl oz; the nearest thing today is the standard 15-oz can of pear halves, which holds roughly four to six halves and something under a cup of syrup.
- The ten minutesThat is a reduction, not a simmer to warm through. Expect the syrup to thicken and darken a little; if it reduces too far it will be very sticky once cool, so loosen it with a spoonful of water.
- CinnamonHalf a stick of cassia or Ceylon bark in this quantity of syrup is assertive after ten minutes of boiling. Fish it out as directed rather than leaving it in the serving dish.
- ServingServes two to three. The recipe does not say whether the pears should be warm or cold; whipped cream or a plain biscuit alongside is in keeping with the period.
Compote in French cookery means fruit cooked or served in sugar syrup, a preparation that predates canning by centuries and was originally a way of holding fruit past its season. What dates this version is that the preserving has already been done by someone else: the recipe begins with opening a tin. Commercial fruit canning expanded enormously in the late nineteenth century, and pears, along with peaches and pineapple, were among the fruits that took well to it. Cookbooks of this era, this one included, quietly absorbed the tin into formal dessert service, and the cook's contribution shrank to flavouring and reheating the syrup so the finished plate still read as a proper compote.