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Apricots, to Dry

This recipe describes drying apricots with sugar and simmering to produce preserved dried fruit.

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 ↓

Apricots, to Dry

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select unripe apricots.

  2. Scald the apricots to remove the skin.

  3. Divide and stone the apricots.

  4. Weigh the apricots.

Make the syrup

  1. Sprinkle the apricots with an equal weight of sugar.

  2. Let the apricots sit for 24 hours.

  3. Transfer the apricots and sugar into a preserving pan.

  4. Simmer gently until clear.

  5. Let the apricots sit in the syrup for two days.

  6. Drain the syrup.

  7. Boil the syrup.

  8. Pour the boiled syrup back over the apricots.

  9. Let the apricots sit in the syrup for another two days.

Dry and store

  1. Dust the apricots with sugar.

  2. Place the apricots in a cool oven to dry.

  3. Store dried apricots in a tin box with writing 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
Provide the fruit body that shrinks and becomes chewy as moisture leaves during drying.
Sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and adds sweetness, helping preserve the apricots.

The step that matters

Simmering the apricots in the syrup until clear. Gentle heat lets sugar penetrate the fruit slowly while keeping its shape. Boiling hard can break the apricots apart and make the texture mushy, so the heat should stay low.

“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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