Home › Dainty Dishes › Fruit Comport
Fruit Comport
Place in champagne glasses, two or three pitted cherries. Then a tablespoonful of lemon ice. Prepare all fruits in small pieces. Mix and place in ice chest until ready to serve. Then cover at table this ice, with champagne. Or, for a change, it may be served from a pineapple. Cut the top from a perfect pineapple; also the bottom, so it will stand on a plate, and garnish with any beautiful green, shred the pulp of the pineapple and mix with the fruit aud ice and when ready to serve pour over any favorite wine and serve at table from the pineapple shell. Grape fruit shells or orange shells may be used and it is most delicious without wine.
A cold assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the whole thing hinges on temperature: the lemon ice is the structure, and once it slumps the dish is just wet fruit. Chill every component, including the glasses or shells, and build at the last possible moment.
- "Comport"A period spelling of compote, here meaning a dish of cut fruit rather than the stewed-in-syrup version. The stemmed dish that fruit was served from was also called a comport, which is where the two senses blur.
- Lemon iceA water ice — sugar syrup, lemon juice and zest, frozen and scraped or churned, with no dairy and usually no egg. A good lemon sorbet stands in exactly; avoid anything creamy, which muddies the fruit.
- Champagne glassesIn this period most likely the wide shallow coupe rather than a modern flute. A coupe or a small dessert bowl holds the ice and fruit properly; a flute is unworkable here.
- "Ice chest"An insulated cabinet cooled by a block of ice, so roughly refrigerator temperature, not freezer. Hold the cut fruit there, but keep the lemon ice in the freezer and scoop it in as you serve, or it will be syrup by the time the wine goes on.
- The pineapple shellCut the top off, take a thin slice from the base so it stands, then cut around the inside wall about half an inch in and lever out the core of flesh. Trim away the fibrous centre before shredding the pulp. Drain the shell upside down and chill it before filling.
- Wine at the tableThe wine is poured over at the moment of serving, not mixed in advance — alcohol thaws the ice fast and the fruit goes limp. About an ounce or two per glass is plenty; a dry sparkling wine works better than sweet, since the ice already carries the sugar.
- Without the wineGrapefruit or orange shells filled with fruit and lemon ice make the same dish for a table that does not drink, and the author says it is "most delicious" that way.
- YieldA medium pineapple shell holds enough for four to six small servings; count on a tablespoon or two of ice and about half a cup of cut fruit per glass if you use coupes.
This belongs to the "dainty dishes" idiom of turn-of-the-century American entertaining, where the achievement was presentation rather than cookery -- a fruit salad becomes a course because it arrives in a hollowed pineapple, banked with greenery, and is finished in front of the guests. Two things made it possible in ordinary households: commercial ice delivery, which put an ice chest in the middle-class kitchen and made water ices something you could buy or keep, and improved steamship and rail transport, which brought Caribbean and Florida pineapples north in growing quantity by the 1890s, when they shifted from a luxury centrepiece to a fruit you could actually cut up. The champagne poured over at the table is doing the same work as the shell: it is theatre, and the closing note that the dish is "most delicious without wine" allows for households that did not serve alcohol.