Skip to main content
Drink

Apricot Water

A simple beverage made by steeping apricots in boiling water and sweetening the resulting liquid with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin the apricots and remove the stones.

Make the apricot water

  1. Pour the boiling water over the apricots and let them stew for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture to collect the clear liquid.

  3. Sweeten the liquid with sugar.

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

Apricots
Provide the fruit flavour that the water takes on as it stews.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the finished liquid.
Boiling water
Draws flavour from the fruit as it stews and makes the liquid.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture to collect the clear liquid.. Pressing or stirring the stewed fruit pushes fine pulp through the strainer and makes the liquid cloudy. Letting it drip through on its own keeps the liquid clear.

“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.

More apricot water recipes

You might also like