Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserve Apricots in Jelly

A method for preserving apricots in a sugar and codlin-liquor jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apricot and ginger work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 341 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Preserve Apricots in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Carefully peel the apricots. Carefully stone the apricots. Weigh the apricots. Strew an equal weight of fine sugar over the apricots. Let the apricots sit overnight.

Cook the apricots

  1. Boil the apricots gently until clear. Transfer the apricots to a bowl. Pour the syrup over the apricots.

Make the jelly

  1. Combine the apricot syrup with 1 quart of codlin-liquor and 1 pound of fine sugar in a pot. Bring to a quick boil until it reaches a jelly consistency. Add the apricots to the jelly. Boil once more. Skim off any scum. Transfer to small pots.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Apricots
Provide the fruit body and flavour that the preserves are built around.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps the jelly set and keep.

The step that matters

Bringing the mixture to a jelly consistency. Sugar and natural fruit pectin must be concentrated enough to set. Boiling too briefly leaves the preserve runny, while boiling too long can darken and toughen it.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

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

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesSoft Ginger CakeSoft Ginger Cake56 recipes