Why it works: Sugar and apricot 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 ↓
Preserved Greengages and Apricots for Tarts, Equal in Flavour to Fresh Fruit
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Wipe each greengage with a dry cloth.
Place greengages in stone jars that hold 1 pound each.
Sprinkle 6 ounces of powdered sugar over the top of each jar.
Cover jars with two tied bladders.
Cook and store
Put jars in a large stewpan and add cold water to reach the neck of the jars.
Boil gently for 3 hours, then remove from heat.
Let jars cool in the water completely.
Wipe the jars, label them, and store in a dry closet.
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.
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Sugar + apricottop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Powdered loaf sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice that helps preserve it in its own syrup.
The step that matters
Boil gently for 3 hours. A gentle simmer heats the fruit through slowly without bursting the skins or boiling the fruit to mush, which keeps the whole greengages intact.
“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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