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Dessert

Apricot Jelly

A sweet preserve made by boiling apricots with water and sugar, optionally flavored with preserved orange or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and cherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 252 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apricot Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apricots

  1. Pare and halve the apricots, removing the stones.

  2. Boil the apricots in enough water to cover them.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve into earthen dishes.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of liquid, add 1 pound of sugar and cook until it reaches a jelly consistency.

  2. Optionally, add a few pieces of preserved orange for flavor.

Make the cherry juice and store

  1. For cherry juice, press the juice out and mix with 1 pound of powdered sugar and a little cinnamon.

  2. Shake the bottles until the sugar dissolves, then let it stand for 8 days.

  3. Filter the juice, pour it back into bottles, seal, and store in a cool place.

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 + cherrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together252 recipes

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

  2. Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cherry + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together551 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Apricot + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together703 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Orange + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together689 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the fruit flavor and the pectin-rich body that sets the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it thicken and set when cooked down.
Cherry juice
Adds a second fruit flavor and liquid to the cherry-sweetened preserve.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the cherry juice to sweeten and preserve it as it stands.

The step that matters

Cooking the jelly to a set. Sugar and fruit pectin set only at the right concentration. Cooking too briefly leaves a runny jelly, while cooking too long can make it stiff and sugary.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sugar, cherry, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar, cherry, cinnamon. 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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