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Sweet Pickle Apricots

A preserved apricot dish made with sugar, cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Sweet Pickle Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar, cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, and cloves in a large pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Cook and preserve

  1. Add apricots to the boiling syrup.

  2. Cook until the apricots are clear but not soft.

  3. Seal the mixture while hot in glass jars.

  4. Store the sealed jars in a cool place.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Clove + apricottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Cider + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, in high concentration, helps preserve it by binding water.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps keep the pickle stable.
Apricots
The main fruit, which softens and takes on syrup flavour as it cooks.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook until the apricots are clear but not soft.. Heat slowly breaks down the fruit's cell walls and pectin, so overcooking turns the apricots mushy. Stopping when they turn translucent keeps their shape while the syrup penetrates.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cider, vinegar, pepper, clove):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cider, vinegar, pepper, clove. 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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