Winter Fruit Compote with Rice Pudding Ice Cream

Fruit compote has a deeply unsexy image as a boarding house breakfast. Even so, winter fruit such as apples and pears lightly stewed with dried summer specimens such as apricots can make a surprisingly effective and appropriate dessert on a December day, when the idea of imported strawberries and raspberries from the southern hemisphere seems daft.

The ice cream recipe will yield almost a litre, a generous amount for just four portions of compote, but it is not worth making any smal