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Dessert

Peaches and Apricots

A preserve made by cooking peaches with sugar and water until the fruit is translucent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peaches and Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the peaches by placing them in a wire basket and plunging them into boiling water until the skins slip off.

  2. Halve the peaches or leave them whole.

  3. Add a few pits for flavor.

  4. Weigh the fruit.

  5. Measure out ¾ or ½ as much sugar.

Make the syrup

  1. Make syrup by adding ½ as much water as the sugar.

  2. Cook until thick like molasses.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the peaches to the syrup.

  2. Cook until they are transparent, removing any scum that forms.

  3. Skim the fruit from the syrup.

  4. If the syrup is thin, cook it down further before filling the jars.

  5. Fill jars, pouring in syrup until full.

  6. Tightly screw on the covers.

  7. Turn the jars upside down.

  8. Tighten the covers as they cool.

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. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the main fruit flavor, body and pectin-bearing pulp that give the jam its texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, as it thickens with cooking, helps preserve it and set its texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup in which the fruit cooks.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to a thick, molasses-like consistency. Sugar concentration must rise enough to set and preserve the jam. If the syrup stays thin, the jam may not gel and can spoil more easily, which is why the record asks you to cook it down further.

“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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