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Dessert

Apricot Jam

A fruit preserve made by boiling apricots with sugar and optional lemon rind, ginger, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apricot Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare the apricots as thinly as possible, then open and remove the stones.

  2. Weigh the prepared fruit and layer it in an earthenware pan, sprinkling with sugar between layers.

  3. Let the fruit and sugar sit for several hours or overnight.

Cook and jar

  1. Transfer the fruit and sugar to a preserving pan and bring just to a boil.

  2. Simmer gently for 30 to 40 minutes until the jam is clear, skimming off any scum.

  3. Remove the apricot halves as whole as possible and place them in jars.

  4. Pour the syrup and any kernels over the apricots, cover, and secure.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Apricot + gingertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together341 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Apricot + clovetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the fruit body, pectin and flavour that set the jam.
Preserving sugar
Sweetens the jam and draws water out of the fruit, helping it set and keep.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until clear. Boiling too hard can break the apricot halves apart and make the jam cloudy. Gentle simmering keeps the fruit whole and lets the syrup thicken evenly as it reaches setting point.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sugar, ginger, clove):

  1. Peachfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar, ginger, clove. 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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