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Apricot Marmalade

A preserve made by cooking apricots with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apricot Marmalade

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Halve the apricots and remove the stones.

  2. Place the apricots in an earthen pan or jar and cover with paper.

  3. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until soft enough to pass through a coarse sieve.

  4. Transfer the sieved apricots to a preserving pan.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add 14 ounces of sugar for each pound of fruit and boil.

  2. If desired, break the stones, blanch the kernels, bruise them, and add to the marmalade for flavor.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Very ripe apricots
Provide the fruit pulp and natural pectin that set the marmalade.
Sifted lump sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the marmalade thicken and keep as a preserve.

The step that matters

Boil the sieved fruit with the sugar. Sugar and fruit must be boiled long enough to reach a thick, set consistency. Undercooking leaves the marmalade runny and prone to spoiling, while overcooking can darken and caramelise it.

“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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