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Preserve

To Preserve Apricots

A method for preserving apricots in sugar syrup and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and brandy work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Preserve Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the apricots and remove the stones with a skewer.

  2. Sprinkle part of the sugar over the apricots and let them sit overnight.

Cook and preserve

  1. Gently boil the apricots three or four times, allowing them to cool between each boil.

  2. Remove the apricots from the syrup one by one after the last boil.

  3. Boil the syrup until it thickens and becomes clear, then pour it over the apricots.

  4. Cover the apricots with brandy papers to keep out the air.

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 + brandytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the fruit that is softened and preserved in the sugar syrup.
Loaf sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and forms a thick syrup that preserves it.
French brandy
Adds aroma and flavor, and its alcohol helps keep the preserved fruit from spoiling.

The step that matters

Boil the apricots in stages, cooling between boils. Repeated gentle boiling with cooling in between lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit without splitting or toughening its skin. Boiling too hard or continuously can break the apricots apart and leave the syrup cloudy.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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