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Dried Apricots
3 lbs. dried apricots Sugar to taste Separate the fruit so that each piece will be single, then wash several times in lukewarm water. Pour the water off; put the rinsed fruit into a casserole; cover well with cold water, and let stand for at least twelve hours, keeping the pan covered all the time with the lid.
After the fruit has been thoroughly soaked and has regained its natural size, pour off this water saturated with fruit juice into another fireproof dish, add sugar according to taste (apricots will require a considerable quantity of sugar, peaches and apples less, prunes very little or none, and pears none at all), and cook from twenty to twenty-five minutes until you get a rich fruit syrup. Pour this boiling hot syrup over the soaked fruit. Put the casserole on back of the stove and let the fruit simmer very slowly for twenty to forty minutes, according to the quality of it. Now remove the casserole from the stove, keep the lid on the dish, and let it cool.
A method rather than a fixed formula: soak, build a syrup from the soaking water, then poach the fruit gently in it. Most of the adjustments needed today come from the fact that dried fruit is no longer dried as hard as it was in 1912.
- The hinge: never boil the fruitThe syrup is boiled separately and poured over the fruit hot; the fruit itself only ever simmers "very slowly." Boiling apricots collapses them into jam and clouds the syrup, which defeats the point of a dish meant to come to table with each half intact.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the coolest zone, holding a bare shiver of movement. On a gas or electric hob use the lowest setting, or set the covered dish in a 275-300F oven, which is easier to hold steady.
- Soaking timeTwelve hours suited fruit dried to leather. Modern semi-dried apricots are sold much moister and may plump in a few hours, and can soften too far if left overnight. Soak until they have swollen and feel yielding, then stop.
- Sugar to tasteFor 3 lb of apricots, start with roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sugar in the soaking liquid and taste the syrup as it reduces. Sulfured apricots tend to taste tarter than unsulfured; the darker, browner unsulfured fruit may need less.
- The syrupThe recipe allows twenty to twenty-five minutes to cook the soaking water down to a syrup, but judge by consistency, not the clock, since the volume of water you covered the fruit with is left to you.
- The casseroleHere a casserole is a lidded fireproof pot used directly on the range, not a baking dish. Any heavy lidded saucepan or Dutch oven does the same work; earthenware holds the low heat evenly.
- Washing the fruitSeveral rinses in lukewarm water made sense for loose dried fruit; packaged apricots need one rinse at most.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of dried apricots gives roughly 12 to 16 servings, so halve or quarter the quantity for a household. Cooled in its syrup and covered, it keeps a week refrigerated and is served plain, with cream, or as a sauce for rice pudding or plain cake.
Compotes of dried fruit were the standard winter and early-spring sweet in Anglo-American households before year-round fresh produce, and cookbooks of the period print them among the sweet courses, not because anything is baked. The technique here is older than the book: soak, reserve the soaking liquid because the sugar and flavor have leached into it, reduce that liquid to a syrup, and return it to the fruit. What dates the recipe is the casserole itself. Fireproof earthenware appears to have been marketed with some vigor in Britain and America in the years before the First World War as a fuel-saving, one-dish way of cooking. The parenthetical ranking of sugar needs across apricots, peaches, apples, prunes and pears is the practical heart of the entry, and reflects a kitchen that bought dried fruit by the pound from a barrel or sack rather than in sealed packets.