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Apricots, Frosted
Choose twelve sound apricots: put them into a saucepan with cold water to cover them and a piece of alum the size of a nut. Let them stew a few minutes very gently, until the skin can be drawn off. Remove the skin, dip the apricots in clarified butter, and strew thickly over them sugar coarsely crushed. Put them into a moderate oven until the sugar sparkles; but take care that the fruit is not broken. Pile them on a dish, and serve cold. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 3d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A simple Victorian dessert: apricots peeled, buttered, crusted in coarse sugar and glazed in the oven. Two instructions need rethinking — the alum and the baking time.
- Skip the alumAlum (potassium aluminium sulphate) was added to poaching water to keep fruit firm and bright. A lump "the size of a nut" is far more than any modern cook would use, it leaves a puckering astringency, and it does nothing the recipe needs. Peel the apricots in plain simmering water, or blanch them 20-30 seconds and slip the skins off as you would a peach.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally about 350F/175C. The apricots have only been briefly stewed to loosen the skins, not cooked through; the oven is there to melt and set the sugar crust.
- The quarter hour is too longThe quarter hour is likely too long -- Fifteen minutes at 350F risks collapsing ripe stone fruit, which is what the recipe cautions against when it says the fruit must not break. Watch for the sugar to turn glassy and just begin to catch — usually 5-8 minutes — and pull them out. A broiler for a minute or two, watched constantly, does the same job faster.
- Stew "a few minutes very gently"Barely a simmer, and only until the skin loosens. Fully ripe apricots may need under a minute; firm ones two or three. Lift them out with a slotted spoon rather than pouring them into a colander.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids removed, so it will not scorch or speckle under the sugar. Melt unsalted butter gently, let it settle, and spoon off the clear fat; ghee works without any preparation.
- "Sugar coarsely crushed"Not caster, which dissolves into syrup and runs off. The period sense is loaf or lump sugar broken up coarsely; use a coarse sanding sugar, demerara, or crushed sugar cubes so the grains stay large enough to sparkle.
- StonesThe original leaves the apricots whole. They are easier to eat and less likely to burst if halved and stoned first, glazed cut side up — you lose the domed look but keep the fruit intact.
- Yield and costTwelve apricots for five or six people, served cold and piled on a dish. The "2s. 3d." is the book's own period retail estimate and has no straightforward modern equivalent.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery arranged thousands of short entries alphabetically, which is why a dessert this slight gets its own headword alongside apricot jam, tart and compote. Frosting or "crusting" fruit in sugar was a standard way to finish a dinner in the decades when dessert meant fruit rather than pudding, and the sparkling crust was the point: it gave a plain poached apricot the glitter expected of a table. The alum is the period detail. Alum was a routine household and commercial firming agent in the nineteenth century, used in pickles, in candied peel and, notoriously, in bread adulteration. It fell out of domestic use, though the reasons are not easily reduced to one: food-purity law tightened over the same period, and cooks had in any case learned that careful heat does much of the same work. Apricots themselves were a luxury in Britain, grown on trained wall trees in walled gardens or imported at cost, which is what makes the recipe's insistence that the fruit not break more than fussiness.