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Sauce

Apricot Sauce

A sweet sauce made from apricot pulp and sugar, thickened with arrowroot and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Apricot Sauce

Why it works: Apricot and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Apricot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine apricot pulp and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Boil for 5 to 10 minutes.

  3. Thicken with arrowroot as needed.

  4. Strain the mixture.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricot pulp
Provides the main fruit flavor and the bulk of the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the sauce reduce to a richer body.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated in liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening with arrowroot. Arrowroot starch must be fully hot to swell and thicken, but it can thin out if overcooked or boiled too long. Add it gradually and check the texture before straining.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootthe original
  4. Beetrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar. 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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