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Dessert

Dbied Apricots

A method of preserving apricots by layering with sugar, boiling, scalding, and drying.

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 ↓

Dbied Apricots

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Pare and stone the apricots.

  2. Layer the apricots and sugar in a container.

  3. Pour off the syrup.

  4. Add ½ cup of water.

  5. Boil the syrup.

Cook and rest the fruit

  1. Add the fruit to the boiling syrup and let it boil briefly.

  2. Cool the fruit in the syrup.

  3. Scald the fruit again, adding a little water.

  4. If the syrup is too thick, let it sit for a couple of days.

  5. Scald again.

  6. If the syrup is clear, drain the fruit on a sieve.

Dry and store

  1. Dry the fruit before a fire or in a very cool oven.

  2. Once completely dry, store the fruit in boxes with paper between layers.

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
The fruit is the main subject; scalding in syrup softens it and lets it take up sugar.
Sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and builds a syrup that preserves it and sweetens it.

The step that matters

Scalding the fruit in syrup. Repeated boiling and cooling in syrup gradually draws water out of the fruit and lets sugar replace it. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave the fruit tough or the syrup too thin to preserve it well.

“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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