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Fresh Plums
Select twenty-four thoroughly ripe, sound, fresh sweet plums, neatly wipe, dress on a compotier, and send to table with powdered sugar separately.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but a piece of table service: the instructions are about selection, presentation and the sugar that goes alongside.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit and compotes, raised above the cloth on a short stem. Any raised cake stand or shallow pedestal bowl does the same job.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period this means finely ground granulated sugar — what is now sold as caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will taste chalky against wet fruit.
- Wipe, do not washThe dusty grey bloom on a plum is its own protection and washing it off shortens the fruit's life on the table. A dry cloth or a barely damp one, then dried, keeps the skins glossy.
- Choosing the fruit"Sweet plums" points to dessert varieties rather than the tart cooking plums such as damsons, which were generally destined for the kitchen. Look for fruit that yields slightly at the stem end and smells of itself.
- ServingTwenty-four plums would make a dessert course for roughly six to eight, three or four each. Serve at cool room temperature rather than refrigerator-cold, which flattens the aroma; if they have been chilled, bring them out half an hour ahead.
- The sugar bowlSent "separately" means in a small bowl of its own, for diners to help themselves. Sugaring the fruit in advance draws juice and leaves it sitting in syrup.
The International Cook Book is by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its bulk comes from the professional restaurant repertoire — which is why a page on plums reads like an instruction to a waiter rather than to a cook. In formal dining of the period the dessert service ended with a fruit course, and raw fruit was expected to be presented as carefully as anything that had passed through the range: wiped, and raised on a compotier. Entries of this kind, of which the book has many, are a reminder that a cookbook of that era was also a manual of service, and that "dressing" a dish once meant arranging it rather than pouring anything over it.