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 ↓
Preserve Green Apricots
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the apricots
Place apricots in a pan of hard water with plenty of vine leaves.
Set the pan over a slow fire until the apricots are quite yellow.
Remove the apricots from the pan.
Rub the apricots with a flannel and coarse sea salt to remove lint.
Return the apricots to the pan with the same water and vine leaves.
Cover the pan tightly.
Set the pan at a distance from the fire until the apricots turn light green.
Carefully pick out any bad or broken apricots.
Make the syrup and preserve
Gently boil the best apricots two or three times in a thin syrup.
Allow the apricots to cool completely after each boil.
Make a syrup with double-refined sugar, ensuring it is not too thick.
Gently boil the apricots in the syrup.
Transfer the apricots to pots or glasses.
Dip paper in brandy.
Lay the brandy-soaked paper over the apricots.
Store the apricots for later use.
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.
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Apricot + brandytop 8% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together513 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
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Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,630 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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 whose flesh softens and sets in the syrup during preserving.
- Double-refined sugar
- Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.
- Brandy
- Adds aroma and, through the soaked paper, a protective surface layer over the fruit.
The step that matters
Repeated boiling in thin syrup. Boiling gently and cooling fully between rounds lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit. Boiling too hard or too thick a syrup can break the apricots apart or toughen the skins.
Swap the apricot
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, brandy):
- Vanillafits better
- Apricotthe original
- Raisinfits about as well
- 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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