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Apricot Paste

A preserved apricot paste made by boiling apricots, straining, and mixing with clarified sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Remove the stones from the apricots.

  2. Boil the apricots in water until they break down.

  3. Drain and pass the apricots through a sieve.

  4. Dry and weigh the apricot paste.

Make the paste sweet

  1. Mix the same weight of clarified sugar with the paste.

  2. Boil the mixture until it thickens more than for marmalade.

Shape, dry and store

  1. Pour the paste into molds or shape it into thin flat cakes.

  2. Dry the cakes in the oven or stove.

  3. Wrap each piece in paper and store in boxes.

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 pulp that forms the body and flavor of the paste.
Clarified sugar
Adds sweetness and, once boiled down, helps the paste set firm and keep well.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it thickens more than for marmalade. Sugar and fruit must be cooked long enough to reach a high concentration of sugar, which sets the paste firm and helps it keep. Stopping early leaves it soft and prone to spoiling.

“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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