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Green Apricots, Wet

Apricots preserved in syrup after blanching and repeated boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and syrup work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 451 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Green Apricots, Wet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apricots

  1. Select apricots without stones and use a needle to ensure no stones have formed.

  2. Shake apricots in a bag with coarse sea salt to clean off the down.

  3. Blanch apricots in boiling water until they float and their skins soften.

  4. Remove from boiling water and drop into cold water to cool.

Make the syrup and steep

  1. Drain apricots and place them in syrup that has been boiled to "Small Thread".

  2. Boil the apricots in syrup a few times, removing any scum that rises.

  3. Ensure there is enough syrup for the fruit to float.

  4. Pour the mixture into a cool pan and cover for 24 hours.

  5. Drain off the syrup and add more syrup, boiling it to one degree higher.

  6. Return the fruit to the syrup and boil a few times, ensuring syrup covers the fruit.

Repeat and seal

  1. Repeat this process daily for four to five days, adding more syrup each time.

  2. Boil the syrup one degree higher each day until it reaches "Large Pearl".

  3. Remove scum each time and store the fruit in clean pans.

  4. When sealing, use a wet bladder to tie over the top of the jar.

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 + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
The fruit that is preserved; its skins soften during blanching and it absorbs the syrup.
Syrup
Sugar syrup that preserves the fruit and gives it sweetness and body as it is concentrated stage by stage.
Coarse sea salt
Used to rub off the fruit's fine surface down before cooking.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup one degree higher each day. Raising the syrup's concentration gradually lets sugar slowly replace the fruit's water, so the fruit stays firm and preserved. Jumping to a high concentration too fast can toughen or shrivel the fruit, while too little concentration leaves it open to spoilage.

“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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