Home › The Principles of Cookery › Apricot Syrup
Apricot Syrup
Take off the skins from some ripe apricots, stone them, and cut them into small pieces; place them in a dish, and strew over them a thin layer of sifted sugar. Let them remain a couple of hours; place them in a saucepan with a little water, and let them simmer gently until they are soft. Strain the juice, and add to it sugar in the proportion of a pound to a pint. Boil it gently, skimming thoroughly all the time; let it get cold, then bottle it; it will be found useful to flavour custards, cream ices, etc. The fruit in the jelly-bag must not be squeezed. After the juice has run from it, it will make very nice tartlets, with the addition of a little sugar. Time to boil with the sugar, ten or twelve minutes, by which time it will become thick and clear. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pint.
A clear fruit syrup made by macerating, simmering and straining apricots, then boiling the juice with sugar. The whole thing hangs on not forcing the pulp through the bag.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe original is explicit on this point: pressure pushes pulp and fine solids through, and the syrup turns cloudy. Let it drip unaided, however long that takes, and use the drained pulp for the tartlets suggested at the end.
- Imperial pint and poundCassell's pint is 20 fluid ounces, about 2 1/2 US cups. A pound of sugar to that pint works out at roughly 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar per 2 1/2 cups juice -- a little under equal weights, since a pint of juice weighs about 1 1/4 lb.
- Skinning the fruitRipe apricots do not peel as readily as peaches. Blanch them 20-30 seconds in boiling water and slip the skins, or simply leave the skins on, since the fruit is strained anyway and the skins add colour.
- The two-hour sugaringStrewing sugar over the cut fruit draws out juice osmotically, so less water is needed in the pan and the flavour is more concentrated. Do not skip it in favour of adding more water.
- How much water"A little water" means just enough to keep the fruit from catching, a few tablespoons for a couple of pounds of apricots. The sugared fruit will release plenty of its own liquid within a minute or two of heating.
- Ten to twelve minutesThat is a real time for a syrup, not a jam: the aim is thick and clear, as the original says, rather than a set. Skim the foam as it rises rather than at the end, or the scum breaks up and clouds the syrup.
- StorageThis is a boiled sugar syrup, not a properly canned preserve. Bottling it cold as directed gives no shelf stability; keep it refrigerated and use it within a few weeks, or freeze it in small quantities.
- Yield and useThe original gives no quantities, only the pound-to-pint ratio once the juice is measured. It is strong stuff, meant to flavour custards and cream ices by the spoonful.
Fruit syrups occupy a specific place in a Victorian kitchen: they were the household's way of keeping summer flavour in a form that could be poured, at a time when fresh apricots had a season of a few weeks and commercial flavouring essences were expensive and often adulterated. The syrup is a building block, feeding into the custards and cream ices elsewhere in the book. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pint" is characteristic of the Dictionary, which costed nearly every recipe so a housekeeper could weigh it against the shop-bought alternative. Apricots themselves were grown extensively against English walls and in the glasshouses of larger establishments, and were also imported from France, which is why a middle-class manual could assume access to ripe fruit cheap enough to boil down.