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Apricot Sauce

A sweet sauce made from apricot jam, lemon juice, and syrup, optionally flavored with rum.

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

Why it works: Apricot and rum work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 149 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apricot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the apricot jam, lemon juice, and syrup for 5 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture and serve.

  3. Optionally, substitute the lemon juice with rum.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + rumtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  3. Syrup + rumtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together367 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Apricot + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + rumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricot jam
Provides fruit flavor and thickens the sauce as it cooks.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and body to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the jam and syrup.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, syrup, rum):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, syrup, rum. 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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