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Preserve

Preserve Ripe Apricots

A method for preserving ripe apricots in sugar syrup with apricot kernels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserve Ripe Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare the apricots and remove the stones with a skewer.

  2. Weigh the apricots and use the same weight of loaf sugar.

  3. Strew some sugar over the apricots and let them sit overnight.

Cook the preserve

  1. Boil the apricots gently three or four times, allowing them to cool between each boiling.

  2. Carefully remove the apricots from the syrup one by one.

  3. Boil the syrup with all the remaining sugar and skim it carefully.

  4. Pour the syrup over the apricots and cover with brandy paper and bladder.

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

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

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 and natural flavour that the preserve is built around.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at this high ratio, helps preserve it and set the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the apricots gently several times. Repeated gentle boiling with cooling between rounds lets the sugar syrup penetrate the fruit slowly. Rapid or continuous boiling would break down the apricots and cloud the preserve.

“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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