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To Preserve Apricots

A method for preserving apricots by boiling them with sugar and storing them in syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

To Preserve Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel 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 to four times, allowing them to cool between each boil.

  2. After the last boil, skim the syrup well and boil it until thick and clear.

  3. Pour the syrup over the apricots and cover with brandy papers.

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

Apricots
Provide the fruit that is cooked and preserved in the sugar syrup.
Loaf sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and forms a thick syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Boiling the apricots in repeated rounds. Letting the fruit cool between boils allows sugar to slowly penetrate the flesh without collapsing it. Boiling once hard would toughen or break the apricots and leave the syrup uneven.

“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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