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Apricot Preserve

A preserve made by steeping apricots in lime and salt water, then cooking them in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 95 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Apricot Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wipe apricots carefully with a cloth and remove the stones, or leave them whole.

  2. Steep apricots overnight in a solution of lime and salt water (1 tablespoon lime and 2 tablespoons salt per 6 pints of water).

Make the syrup

  1. Make a thick syrup using equal parts sugar and water.

Cook and jar

  1. Rinse apricots in fresh water and let them dry slightly in the sun.

  2. Add apricots to the syrup and cook until they are clear and transparent.

  3. Fill jars with the apricots, adjust rubbers, and screw down lids tightly.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Apricot + limetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Form the body of the preserve, softening and turning clear as they absorb the syrup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, in a thick syrup, draws water out of the fruit to help preserve it.

The step that matters

Cooking the apricots in the syrup until clear. Sugar syrup needs time to penetrate the fruit, so the apricots turn clear. Boiling too hard or too long can break the fruit down and make it mushy.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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