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Apricot Jam

A preserve made by cooking apricots with sugar and apricot kernels, finished with apple jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apricot Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the apricots into pieces and remove the stones.

  2. Mash the apricots in a large copper preserving pan over medium heat, mashing continuously.

  3. Force the mashed apricots through a colander or wire sieve using a pestle.

Cook the jam

  1. Boil the apricot pulp for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  2. For every pound of pulp, prepare a pound of sugar boiled to caramel height.

  3. Add the sugar to the pulp and boil for 20 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Add a few blanched apricot kernels.

Pot the jam

  1. Pour the jam into pound or half-pound pots and top with apple jelly.

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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Ripe apricots
Provide the fruit pulp that forms the body and main flavour of the jam.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps the jam thicken and keep.
Apricot kernels (blanched)
Add a subtle almond-like aroma to the finished jam.
Apple jelly
Adds pectin, which helps the jam set when used on top of the pots.

The step that matters

Boiling the pulp with the sugar for 20 minutes. Once the sugar is in, the jam must boil long enough for the sugar concentration and heat to reach the point where the fruit pectin sets the jam. Constant stirring keeps the mixture from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would give a burnt taste.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Apricotthe original
  4. Quincefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple. 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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