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Apricot Sauce

A fruit sauce made from water, sugar, apricot jam, lemon juice, and sherry.

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

Why it works: Apricot and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apricot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the water and castor sugar in a small saucepan.

  2. Boil for five minutes.

  3. Add the apricot jam, lemon juice, and sherry.

  4. Boil for an additional ten minutes.

  5. Strain the sauce around the pudding.

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. Apricot + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together173 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Sugar + apricottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Apricot jam
Provides fruit flavour and sweetness, and thickens the sauce as it reduces.
Sherry
Adds aromatic depth and a warm, complex flavour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the jam and sugar.

The step that matters

Boil for an additional ten minutes. Boiling after the jam, lemon and sherry are added reduces the liquid and concentrates flavour. Too little boiling leaves the sauce thin and dull, while over-boiling can make it too thick or sticky.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apricot, sherry. 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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