Skip to main content
Drink

Apricot Ice

A chilled frozen beverage made from dried apricots, sugar, citrus juice, ice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Apricot Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Soak the dried apricots in warm water until tender.

  2. Ensure there is 1 quart of liquid remaining after cooking.

  3. Strain off the juice and chill it.

Make and freeze

  1. Add sugar and the juice of the lemons and orange to the chilled juice.

  2. Freeze the mixture with 3 parts ice to 1 part salt.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Apricot + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together703 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Dried apricots
Provide the main flavor, body and natural sweetness of the ice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the fruit flavor and balances the sugar.
Orange
Adds extra juice, sweetness and a fragrant citrus aroma.

The step that matters

Freeze the mixture with 3 parts ice to 1 part salt.. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, making the brine colder than ice alone. This cold is what freezes the mixture, so the ice-to-salt ratio determines how well it sets.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, orange):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange. 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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes