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Apricot Brandy
Put the apricots, which must be sound, but not quite ripe, into a preserving-pan, with sufficient water to cover them; allow them to boil; then simmer gently till tender. Remove the skins. To every pound of fruit, take one pound of loaf sugar and a wine-glassful of water. Clarify and boil the sugar, and pour it over the fruit. Let it remain twenty-four hours. Then put the apricots into glasses, and fill them up with syrup and brandy, half and half, and keep them well corked, and the tops of the corks securely sealed. They must be kept twelve months before using. They should be prepared in July. Time to simmer the apricots, about one hour.
This is brandied apricots rather than a distilled spirit "brandy" " the name follows the older usage in which fruit put down in spirit takes the name of the spirit. The hinge is the alcohol: the finished liquid must be half brandy by volume, or the fruit is not preserved.
- Use full-strength brandyPreservation here depends largely on the alcohol in the finished liquid: half-and-half with a 40% ABV (80 proof) brandy puts the jar somewhere around 20%, at or near the level at which yeasts and moulds are checked, with the heavy sugar syrup also working against spoilage. Keep the half-and-half proportion and use a full-strength spirit; flavoured or reduced-strength brandies will give a weaker and less reliable result.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is about 2 fl oz, a quarter of a cup. It is only there to dissolve the sugar, so precision hardly matters.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a cone or block, which cooks broke up and clarified. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, pound for pound with the fruit.
- Clarifying the sugarThe nineteenth-century step of boiling the syrup with beaten egg white and skimming off the scum was needed because loaf sugar carried impurities. Modern sugar is clean; dissolve it in the water, bring to a boil, and skim if anything rises.
- Under-ripe fruit is deliberateFirm, slightly green apricots hold their shape through an hour's simmering and a year in syrup. Ripe fruit collapses into mush. Do not improve on this.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy stainless pan. Any wide heavy-bottomed pan works; width matters more than material because it lets the fruit lie in a single layer.
- Glasses, corks and sealsThe original means straight-sided preserving glasses closed with cork and sealed with wax or bladder against evaporation. Sterilised glass jars with new two-piece or clip-and-gasket lids do the same job. The seal is against alcohol loss and airborne mould, not a vacuum process.
- Storage and the twelve monthsKeep them dark and cool. The long wait appears to be for flavour rather than safety -- the fruit takes up spirit and the syrup takes up apricot -- though the recipe itself insists on the full twelve months. Check that the fruit stays fully submerged; anything standing proud of the liquid will discolour and can mould.
- Yield and servingThe recipe sets no quantity of fruit; sugar is scaled pound for pound. Two pounds of apricots, once syrup and brandy are added, will fill something in the region of two quart jars. Serve a few fruits with their syrup as a dessert, over ice cream or plain cream, or with cold roast game or ham.
Fruit put down in sugar and spirit was one of the standard ways an English household carried summer into winter, and the practice long predates Cassell's " recipes for "apricocks in brandy" appear in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt books. The instruction to prepare them in July is the practical heart of the entry: English and imported apricots had a short season, and a book like Cassell's, written for middle-class households running on a calendar of gluts, assumed its reader would be putting up whatever was cheap that week. The insistence on fruit that is "sound, but not quite ripe" reflects the same economy " slightly early fruit was firmer and held its shape in the jar. Preserves of this kind were generally associated with the dessert course, set out alongside nuts and dried fruit after the cloth was drawn.