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Dessert

Apricot Sauce

A sauce made from apricots, sugar, milk, corn starch, and water, cooked and cooled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Apricot Sauce

Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Apricot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the thickener

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Mix the corn starch with a few tablespoons of cold milk.

  3. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk and cook for 10 minutes.

Make the apricot syrup

  1. In a separate pot, boil the sugar and water together for 20 minutes.

  2. Rub the apricots through a sieve and stir them into the syrup.

Combine and cool

  1. Beat well, then mix in the boiled milk and corn starch.

  2. Place the saucepan in a dish of cold water, stir for about 8 minutes, then set aside to cool.

  3. If you have cream, use it instead of milk.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Apricot + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Apricot + corntop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Canned apricots
Provide the main fruit flavor and, once sieved, the smooth body of the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps build the body of the syrup.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the starch thickens.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as its granules swell and gelatinize in heat.

The step that matters

Mixing the starch into the milk. Corn starch clumps if added dry or to hot liquid without being dispersed first in cold milk. Stirring it in smoothly lets the granules swell evenly as the mixture heats, giving a uniformly thick sauce.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, corn. 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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