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Dried Apricot Jam

A jam made by boiling dried apricots with water, sugar, and almonds.

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

Dried Apricot Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour 4 pints of boiling water over 1 lb of dried apricots and let it stand for 48 hours.

Make the jam

  1. Boil the fruit for 1 hour.

  2. Add 4 lbs of sugar and 1 lb of chopped blanched almonds.

  3. Boil for 1½ hours.

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, which softens and breaks down into a thick, sweet pulp as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with boiling, thickens it and helps it keep.
Blanched almonds
Add crunch and a nutty flavour that contrasts with the soft fruit.

The step that matters

Boiling the fruit and sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully before the long boil, and the mixture needs enough time at a steady boil for pectin and sugar concentration to set the jam. Stopping early leaves it runny.

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.

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