Haha they definitely meant compote but here's an interesting fact. Compote comes from French compote which I thought had an accent on the o but apparently doesn't. When French has an accent over a vowel it typically indicates that an s has been dropped from old French, which would have made sense because the og French word was actually composte.
As a French speaker I had never heard of this, but I looked it up and it's indeed the case specifically for circumflex accents (ê, ô, â, î) and not the others.
A neat resource (in French naturally) that I found on this:
I'm a native English speaker so I'm sure it's one of those interesting things they taught in school that a native speaker would have no need to learn. But it explains why many English words have an s when the modern French word doesn't since so many words were borrowed into English from Old French.