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Apricot Ratafia

A sweet apricot liqueur made by simmering apricots with wine, brandy, sugar, and spices, then macerating and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Apricot Ratafia

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Cover sliced apricots with white wine and simmer gently until reduced to a pulp, about 30 minutes.

  2. Pour the mixture into an earthen jar.

Macerate and preserve

  1. Add brandy and sugar to the jar.

  2. Add broken apricot kernels, mace, cloves, and cinnamon.

  3. Let the mixture macerate for two weeks.

  4. Strain the liquid and preserve it in well-closed vessels.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Apricot + brandytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Apricot + cinnamontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  5. White wine + brandytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together620 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Sliced apricots
Provide the fruit flavor and body, breaking down into a pulp when simmered.
Brandy
Acts as the alcohol base that extracts and preserves the fruit flavor during maceration.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the alcohol and fruit acidity.
White wine
Softens the apricots and adds liquid for cooking them down into a pulp.

The step that matters

Simmering the apricots to a pulp. Cooking gently rather than hard keeps the fruit from scorching and lets it break down evenly. Stopping at the right point gives a smooth base that extracts flavor well during maceration.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, white wine, brandy, sugar, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, white wine, brandy, sugar, clove, cinnamon. 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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