Skip to main content
Dessert

Apricot Jam

A sweet jam made from dried apricots, water, sugar, and sweet almonds.

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

Why it works: Apricot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Apricot Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Soak the dried apricots in 2 quarts of water for 24 to 30 hours.

  2. Cut the soaked apricots into quarters and simmer gently until tender.

Make the jam

  1. Add 5 lbs of loaf sugar and boil until the mixture jellies.

  2. Blanch a few sweet almonds, chop them, and boil in the jam instead of kernels.

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 + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dried apricots
Provide the fruit base, flavor, and natural body that the jam thickens around.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens, preserves the fruit, and helps the mixture set into a jelly as it boils.
Sweet almonds
Add a mild nutty aroma and a little texture to the finished jam.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture jellies. Sugar, fruit pectin, and acid must reach the gel point together. Stopping early leaves the jam runny, while boiling too long makes it stiff and grainy.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

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

More apricot jam recipes

Pineapple 3 See all 90 →

You might also like

Almond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesApricot Ice CreamApricot Ice Cream26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipesAlmond WafersAlmond Wafers22 recipes