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Apricot Biscuits

Dried apricot biscuits made by boiling apricots with sugar and baking until dry.

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 ↓

Apricot Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and reduce the apricots to yield 1 pound of pulp.

  2. Stir in the sifted sugar and boil both together for about 15 minutes.

Shape and dry

  1. Pour the mixture into paper cases or drop it onto paper in small cake shapes.

  2. Dry them in a slow oven (300°F / 150°C) or before a fire for several days.

  3. Turn them each day.

Store

  1. Store in boxes or tins and keep dry for winter use.

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

Ripe apricots
Provide the fruit flavor, natural sweetness and the body of the biscuit.
Fine loaf sugar
Sweetens the pulp, thickens it as it boils and helps preserve it during drying.

The step that matters

Boiling the apricot and sugar together. Heat drives off water and the sugar concentrates, so the pulp thickens enough to hold its shape. Too little boiling leaves the biscuits soft and prone to spoiling; too much can scorch the sugar and make them bitter.

“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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