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Apricots Ripe, Wet

Ensure pots are not damp to prevent spoilage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apricots Ripe, Wet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Split the apricots in half and peel them.

  2. Boil water in a preserving pan and add the apricots.

  3. When soft, separate the soft ones into one bowl and the harder ones into another.

  4. In a new preserving pan, boil a thin syrup.

  5. Drain the apricots and add the harder ones to the syrup, boiling for 10 minutes.

  6. Transfer the hard apricots to a flat earthen pan and cover with paper.

  7. Boil the soft apricots in the syrup for a minute or two, then add them to the same pan as the hard ones and cover.

  8. The next day, boil the hard apricots for 5 minutes and drain the syrup from the soft ones.

  9. Boil the syrup and pour it over the soft apricots while hot.

  10. Repeat this process for four or five days, keeping the apricots covered with syrup.

  11. Finally, transfer the apricots to pots and pour a little apple jelly over the top.

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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Apricotthe original
  4. Quincefits about as well

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

More preserved apricots recipes

in Jelly 3 See all 45 →

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