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Apricots, Dried and Salted

Apricots are soaked in salt water, dried, flattened, soaked in lime water, sugared, and packed in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 95 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Apricots, Dried and Salted

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the apricots in salt water (2 ounces of salt to 1 quart of water) for a few hours.

  2. Lay the apricots on a mat to dry in the sun.

  3. The next day, press them between your hands to flatten and remove the stones.

  4. Repeat the drying process the following day.

Crystallize and pack

  1. To crystallize, soak the apricots in lime water for 5 minutes until tender.

  2. Remove and dry them with a soft cloth, then rub sugar into each apricot.

  3. Pack the apricots closely in jars with plenty of sugar in between.

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 + limetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Soft ripe apricots
Provide the fruit that dries into a chewy, concentrated texture and sweet flavor.
Crystallized white sugar
Coats the apricots, adding sweetness and preserving them by drawing out moisture.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the fruit during soaking and helps draw out moisture before drying.

The step that matters

Soaking in lime water. Soaking for too long can make the apricots overly soft or break them apart. The record specifies five minutes until tender, so check texture closely; the lime water firms and prepares the fruit for sugar to adhere.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar. 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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