Skip to main content
Dessert

To Preserve Apricots in Jelly

A method of preserving apricots by coating them with sugar, boiling, and encasing them in a jelly made from codlin liquor and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Preserve Apricots in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Thinly pare and stone the apricots.

  2. Weigh an equal amount of fine powdered sugar and sprinkle it over the fruit.

  3. Let it sit overnight.

Make the preserves

  1. The next day, gently boil the apricots until they are clear.

  2. Transfer the fruit to a bowl and pour the syrup over it.

  3. The following day, combine the syrup with 1 quart of codlin liquor and 1 pound of fine sugar.

  4. Boil quickly until it reaches a jelly consistency.

  5. Add the fruit to the mixture, bring to a boil, skim off any foam, and pour into 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 + 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

Apricots
Provide the fruit body and flavour of the preserves.
Fine powdered sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and sweetens it before cooking.
Codlin liquor
Adds apple-derived pectin to help the syrup set into a jelly.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps it thicken to a jelly consistency.

The step that matters

Boil quickly until it reaches a jelly consistency. Sugar and pectin set only at a high concentration; overcooking can make the preserves stiff and dull, while underboiling leaves them runny and prone to spoiling.

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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes