Skip to main content
Dessert

Stewed Dried Apricots

Stewed dried apricots simmered in water and sugar, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apricot and sugar 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 ↓

Stewed Dried Apricots

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the apricots thoroughly and soak them overnight in water.

  2. The next morning, cook the apricots in the same water until tender.

Make the syrup

  1. Remove the apricots and add sugar to the water.

  2. Boil the water down by half and pour it over the fruit.

Serve

  1. Serve cold, prepared the day before for breakfast.

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 + 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, which softens during soaking and cooking to become tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, once dissolved and reduced, a syrup that coats the fruit.

The step that matters

Boiling the water down by half. Reducing the cooking liquid concentrates it into a syrup. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and watery, while over-reducing can make it overly sweet and sticky once cooled.

“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 Ice CreamApricot Ice Cream26 recipesMixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes