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To Marmalade Apricots

A preserve made from apricots, sugar, 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 Marmalade Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the apricots and remove the stones.

  2. Mix the sugar with the apricots and let them stand overnight.

Cook

  1. Place the mixture in a saucepan over low heat and boil gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the apricots from the syrup and mash them in a mortar.

  3. Return the mashed apricots to the syrup and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

Pot and seal

  1. Pour the marmalade into pots and cover with paper dipped in brandy when cool.

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 body, pectin and flavour that the marmalade is built from.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the mixture thicken and keep as it cooks down.
Brandy
Its paper cover adds aroma and helps discourage surface spoilage.

The step that matters

Return the mashed apricots to the syrup and boil for an additional 10 minutes. Boiling concentrates sugar and fruit solids until the mixture reaches a set. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while boiling too long can scorch the sugar and dull the flavour.

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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