This one is in honour of Janine, who took us in when we were driven out of our house and even put up with the temporary residence of our cat, who loves compote on her muesli and who asked for the recipe. It's actually a rip-off of a Claudia Roden recipe and I think the provenance is Turkish - the Turks are absolute experts at puddings so that would make sense.
Before I first made this, I used to find fresh apricots a bit of a waste of effort. Eddie Izzard used to do a routine about how pears are underripe for days and days and days, taunting you with their hardness, then ripe for about 12 hours before becoming immediately overripe and horrible. I find apricots similar, but if anything even more capricious, with an edibility window that seems to be about five minutes. Cooking them is the way around this.
1. Get a bunch of apricots, halve them, and cut out the stone and any stoney stalkey bits. Layer them on the bottom of a frying pan, cut side up.
2. Get some caster sugar and sprinkle it on top. I used about one dessertspoon-full for every three apricots - it doesn't need a lot of sugar because there's so much in the apricots.
3. Get the seeds out of a vanilla pod by slicing it lengthwise and dot as much as you can on the apricots.
4. Put some water on them. They don't need much as, again, there's lots in the apricots. Enough to get halfway up the apricots is more than enough.
5. Put it on to boil on a low simmer. Once the water is boiling a bit, gently turn the apricots to get the sugar and vanilla mixed with the water. Keep it simmering until the apricots get to that nice compotey texture - their firm shape completely lost, but still holding together as discrete half-apricots.
6. Lift the apricots out and into a bowl with a slotted spoon or some such, keeping the syrup in the pan; you'll probably need to drain a bit more syrup back after doing this, as they'll exude syrup once they're out of the pan.
7. Turn the heat right up and let the syrup boil and foam fiercely, not letting it fully caramelise but keeping it on the boil until it's got a nice jammy texture, and the spoon leaves a few seconds' track when you drag it across the bottom.
8. Add this reduced mixture to the strained apricots, stir it together and chillax.
9. A good side for this is ricotta cheese, beaten up with icing sugar and ground cinnamon until it's just slightly sweet. Not too sweet, as the compote is sweet enough.
Yum!
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