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Apricot Marmalade
Peel, quarter, and stone four pounds of ripe apricots, and put them into a preserving-pan, without either water or sugar, and let them boil gently, stirring continually, until the fruit is reduced to a pulp. Then add three pounds of sugar, and a few of the kernels blanched and halved, and boil once more. Put into jars, cover the fruit with an oiled paper, and fasten over each jar a piece of thin paper dipped in gum-water. When dry it will be tight and hard. Time to boil with the sugar, twenty minutes. Sufficient for four or five jars. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
This is a plain, sugar-light apricot jam, but two elements of it put it outside current practice: the kernels stirred into the finished preserve, and the paper-and-gum closure that stands in for a seal.
- The kernels are the problemApricot stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or digested. Blanching loosens the skin but does not remove the compound, and food-safety bodies now advise against eating raw apricot kernels at all; a very small number of them can exceed the acute intake considered tolerable for an adult. "A few of the kernels blanched and halved" is not a quantity that can be made safe by adjustment.
- No sealed closureOiled paper laid on the surface and a sheet of gummed tissue tied over the rim was the Victorian answer to sealing. It excludes dust and slows evaporation but does not exclude mould spores or yeasts, and nothing here is processed after filling. Modern preserving relies on sterilised jars with two-part lids and, for reliable shelf storage, a measured water-bath process.
- Sugar ratio is low for keepingThree pounds of sugar to four pounds of fruit is less sugar than the roughly equal-weight ratio most long-keeping jams use, though boiling the fruit down to a pulp before the sugar goes in concentrates it somewhat. Combined with the open closure, a preserve of this kind is best treated as one to eat within weeks in a cold larder rather than stored.
- If you want apricot jamUse a current tested recipe with modern jars and a stated processing time. Apricot preserves flavoured with a noyau character are made today with almond extract or a splash of amaretto rather than with the stones.
- Reading the old measuresA preserving-pan is a wide, shallow, unlined-copper or brass pan, chosen for fast evaporation rather than depth; a wide stainless pan is its equivalent. "Gum-water" is gum arabic dissolved in water, used as a paste. The "probable cost, 3s. 6d." is a late-Victorian household figure and tells you fruit and sugar together were a real expense.
- YieldThe original's "four or five jars" does not state a size; if these are the pound pots common at the period, four pounds of fruit with three of sugar would fill about that many.
Cassell's uses marmalade in its older, broader sense: not specifically an orange conserve but any fruit boiled to a pulp and sweetened, from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste (marmelo is the quince). The method here — cooking the fruit down dry before any sugar goes near it — is a common way to handle apricots, which are not especially rich in pectin and lose their perfume if boiled long in syrup. The habit of returning a few blanched kernels to the pot belongs to the same nineteenth-century taste that put bitter almonds in ratafias, macaroons and noyau: cooks prized the benzaldehyde note without knowing what else came with it, since amygdalin breaks down to yield both that flavour compound and hydrogen cyanide. Apricots reached British kitchens from walled gardens and, later, from Continental imports; the crop arrived all at once and had to be dealt with quickly.