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Compote of Raspberries with Wine
Place a quart fresh raspberries in a bowl, season with two tablespoons sugar, one tablespoon of kirsch and mix well. Place in a small saucepan one and a half gills claret, with one ounce powdered sugar and a half stick cinnamon. Reduce on fire to half the quantity, let cool off, strain through a cheesecloth over the raspberries, mix well, transfer into a compotier and serve.
A no-cook dessert that depends entirely on the wine syrup being properly cooled before it meets the fruit. Everything else is assembly.
- Cool the syrup completelyWarm claret syrup poured over raspberries collapses them into jam within minutes. Reduce it, then let it come to room temperature or colder before straining it over the fruit.
- A gillHalf a cup. One and a half gills of claret is 6 fl oz, or 3/4 cup, reduced down to about 6 tablespoons.
- ClaretThe English term for red Bordeaux, in use long before this book was written. Any dry, moderately tannic red will do; avoid anything oaky or high in alcohol, since reducing concentrates both.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the phrase usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. One ounce is about two tablespoons of granulated; if you use confectioners', the starch will cloud the syrup slightly.
- KirschClear cherry brandy, unsweetened and quite dry. Not to be confused with cherry liqueur or maraschino, both of which are sweet and would throw the balance off.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for serving fruit. Any shallow bowl works; something clear shows the color, which is the point of the dish.
- Handling the fruitRaspberries bruise if stirred hard. Fold the sugar and kirsch through with a spatula, and do not wash the berries unless you must, since they absorb water and go slack.
- Yield and timingA quart of raspberries is roughly four cups. The recipe gives no yield or standing time; four servings is a reasonable guess, and the berries are best not left to macerate long before serving, since they slump.
The compote in French usage is fruit served in a light syrup rather than cooked to preserve-thickness, and by the late nineteenth century it had settled into the dessert course of the international hotel repertoire, where a cook needed a fruit dish that could be assembled quickly from whatever was in season. The claret reduction with cinnamon is essentially a small-scale version of the spiced wine syrups used for poaching pears and peaches, borrowed here for a fruit too delicate to poach. Kirsch, generally said to be distilled from small black wild cherries or morellos in Alsace, the Black Forest and northern Switzerland, was the standard flavoring spirit for fruit in the kitchens this book draws on; its dryness keeps a dish like this from reading as merely sweet. The recipe names both a compotier and a specific wine.