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Apricots in Brandy

Preserved apricots soaked in brandy with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and brandy work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Apricots in Brandy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jar

  1. Place whole apricots in a jar with a tight lid.

  2. Add sugar, using one fourth of the weight of the apricots.

  3. Pour in enough brandy to cover the apricots.

  4. Cover the fruit with a piece of thick paper.

Heat and seal

  1. Set the jar in a saucepan filled with cold water.

  2. Heat the saucepan until the brandy is hot, then remove the jar.

  3. Allow the jar to cool completely, then cork and seal it securely.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Apricots
Provide the fruit flavour and soft texture that the brandy and sugar preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice, forming a syrup with the brandy.
Brandy
Covers the fruit and acts as a preservative, keeping it from spoiling.

The step that matters

Heat until the brandy is hot, then remove the jar. Gentle heating helps the sugar dissolve and the flavours mix without boiling off the alcohol. Overheating can crack the jar or drive off aroma, so the jar should be removed once the brandy is hot.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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