Skip to main content
Main

Soup of Dried Apricots

A soup made from dried apricots or peaches, sweetened, thickened with farina and egg whites, served in squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apricot and milk work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 826 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Soup of Dried Apricots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit soup

  1. Wash the dried apricots or peaches in warm water.

  2. Boil the dried apricots or peaches for 1 to 2 hours.

  3. Strain the soup.

  4. Add sugar to taste.

Make the farina squares

  1. In a separate pot, boil the farina with sugar in milk until it thickens, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

  2. Remove the farina mixture from heat.

  3. Stir in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Let it cool.

  5. Cut the mixture into 1‑inch squares.

Serve

  1. Bring the strained fruit soup to a boil.

  2. Add the custard squares.

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 + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Dried apricots or peaches
Provide the main fruit flavour and sweetness as they simmer into the soup.
Farina
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the squares their firm, sliceable body.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the farina mixture, adding richness and softness.
Egg whites
Stirred in when beaten, they add structure and help the farina mixture set as it cools.

The step that matters

Stirring the farina constantly. Farina settles and scorches on the bottom of the pot while thickening. Constant stirring keeps the heat even and the texture smooth, so the mixture sets evenly before it is cut into squares.

Swap the apricot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, egg. 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

Apricot SauceApricot Sauce37 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes