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Compote of Apples
(Cherbourg.) Pare and core and cut into halves 6 large, fine apples. To each pound add 1 pound sugar, rind of 2 lemons, and a little ginger. Cook, covered, for 1 hour. Add 1/2 cup of cider, and boil for 1/2 hour, then stir in a spoonful of vanilla, and let them cool, arranged in a dish. Serve with whipped cream, and garnish of cherries, citron, or Angelica.
A Norman apple compote written at preserve strength — the sugar is equal to the weight of the fruit, so this sits closer to a conserve than to a stewed-apple pudding. A few things need pinning down before you start.
- The hinge: keep it barely simmeringThe hinge: keep the heat low -- The recipe gives an hour covered and then a further half hour once the cider is in; it says "boil" for that second stage, and it does not say whether the lid comes off. The practical risk with halved apples is that they break down into applesauce, so keep the heat low, shake the pan rather than stir, and lift the halves out with a slotted spoon when they are translucent, even if the clock says otherwise.
- No liquid at the startThe recipe adds cider only after the first hour. The apples must sweat out their own juice under the lid, which means a heavy pan and gentle heat, or the sugar will catch before any moisture appears. Layering the sugar over the fruit and leaving it half an hour before lighting the burner helps draw the juice out.
- Sugar quantityA pound of sugar to a pound of pared apples is roughly 2 1/4 cups to about three medium apples. Six large apples will run 2 1/2 to 3 lb pared, so expect to use most of a 4 lb bag. This is a period preserving ratio and it is what keeps the halves firm rather than collapsing; reducing it will change the texture as much as the sweetness.
- CiderIn American usage of this period "cider" could mean either sweet (unfermented) apple juice or the fermented drink, and the recipe does not say which. Hard cider or a dry French cidre gives a sharper result and is arguably truer to Cherbourg; either works, but they are not the same drink.
- Lemon rind and gingerTake the rind off in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the pith, so it can be fished out before serving. "A little ginger" is unspecified: a teaspoon of ground ginger, or a couple of coins of fresh root removed at the end, is in keeping.
- A spoonful of vanillaRead this as a teaspoon of extract, not a tablespoon; a tablespoon of modern extract in this quantity of syrup tastes of alcohol. The recipe has it stirred in at the very end, just before the apples cool, and adding it off the heat keeps the flavour from cooking away.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, the bright green strip of Victorian confectionery, is now a specialist item found mainly in baking suppliers. Candied citron or glacé cherries, both named in the original, cover the same job.
- YieldSix apples in halves serves six, two halves each with syrup spooned over. With this much sugar the compote should keep a week or more refrigerated, and the syrup may set to a light jelly when cold.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: the travelling cookbook, in which an American compiler gathers dishes abroad and labels each with the town it came from. Cherbourg sits on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, a region defined by apples rather than grapes — cider and calvados are its drinks, and cider turns up here as the cooking liquid in place of the wine a southern French compote might use. Compote comes from the same Latin root as composite, by way of Old French, and originally meant simply a mixture; by the eighteenth century it had settled into its modern sense of whole or halved fruit cooked slowly in syrup, distinct from a marmalade or a purée precisely because the pieces stay intact. The pound-for-pound sugar and the long slow cooking are preserving technique, not pudding technique, which is why the dish arrives at table cold, glazed, and garnished like confectionery rather than served hot from the pan.