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Apricot Jelly
Pare, core, and halve about thirty ripe apricots. Blanch and pound a few of the kernels, mixing with them the juice of a lemon. Weigh the apricots, put them into a saucepan with an equal weight of sugar and the pounded kernels; let them boil gently, stirring continually, until they form a thick marmalade. Then pour it into a mould which has previously been filled with cold water. Let it remain until quite stiff, and turn out on a glass dish. This is an excellent dish for invalids.
The fruit-and-sugar part of this is a straightforward equal-weight preserve, but the pounded kernels put it outside what can be recommended today, and the dish is explicitly aimed at the people least able to tolerate them.
- The kernels are the problemApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and mixing with lemon juice does. They are the same class of hazard as bitter almonds, whose sale for domestic use is restricted in a number of countries.
- "A few" is not a quantityAmygdalin content varies widely between varieties and between individual stones, so there is no way to reckon the dose from thirty apricots' worth of fruit and an unspecified handful of kernels. Food safety bodies now advise adults against eating more than a very small number of raw kernels at all, and children fewer still.
- Boiling does not make it safeSimmering to a thick marmalade drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but the reduction is partial and unpredictable, and the enzyme reaction has already begun in the mortar. Cooking cannot be relied on to bring an unmeasured quantity into a safe range.
- The intended eater makes it worseThe closing line recommends it for invalids. Small body weight, illness and repeated small servings from the same mould are the conditions under which cyanogenic glycosides cause real harm, not a single mouthful by a healthy adult.
- What to make insteadIf you want a set apricot preserve, use a current apricot jam or fruit-jelly recipe with measured sugar and pectin and no kernels. Nothing in the flavour here depends on them that a little natural almond extract will not stand in for.
- On the settingFor the record, the "jelly" here contains no gelatin or isinglass; it stiffens on the apricots' own pectin and the equal weight of sugar, and the mould is wetted with cold water rather than oiled so the preserve will slip out cleanly.
Equal-weight preserves — a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit — were a standard formula, sugar doing the preserving work and the fruit's own pectin the setting. The kernels are a period habit rather than an eccentricity: apricot, peach and plum stones were the cheap domestic source of the bitter-almond note used in ratafias, noyau and macaroons, and Victorian cookery books call for them freely. The recommendation "for invalids" belongs to the large nineteenth-century literature of sickroom cookery, in which smooth, sweet, spoonable dishes were thought both nourishing and easy on a weak stomach; prussic acid in bitter almonds and stone-fruit kernels was known chemically by this period, though household books seldom translated that into any warning in recipes of this kind.