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Spiced Apricots
8 C sugar. 4 C vinegar. 2 square baskets fresh apricots Few pieces stick cinnamon Few whole cloves Make a syrup of sugar, vinegar and spices. Wash fresh apricots, and drop in boiling syrup until tender. (Takes only a few minutes.) Peaches may also be used. Can and seal hot.
This is a preserving recipe with no measured quantities and no processing step, and it cannot be followed safely as printed. The notes below explain where it fails.
- The syrup has no proportions"Make a syrup of sugar, vinegar and spices" gives no amount of either. There is no way to reconstruct the acid concentration of the finished pack from this text. A current tested recipe for spiced apricots or pickled peaches should be used instead.
- "Can and seal hot" is open-kettle canningFilling jars with hot fruit and sealing them, with no boiling-water bath afterward. The method was common in home canning of this period and is no longer considered adequate: the seal is unreliable and the contents are not held at temperature long enough to deal with organisms introduced during filling.
- "2 square baskets" is not a usable measureFruit of this period was sold in wooden market baskets, and without knowing which container is meant the quantity of fruit cannot be recovered. Combined with the unspecified syrup, the fruit-to-acid ratio is unknowable.
- Whole spices and cloudy syrupStick cinnamon and whole cloves were used rather than ground because they can be lifted out and do not muddy the syrup. Ground spice in a preserve of this kind darkens the fruit and leaves sediment in the jar.
- Why the fruit cooks so brieflyThe instruction that only a few minutes are needed is sound as far as texture goes: apricots collapse quickly in hot syrup. Brief cooking does not, however, substitute for the missing processing step.
- Peaches are not equivalentThe note that peaches may be substituted glosses over a real difference in the fruit and in how the syrup behaves with it. Recipes tested for one stone fruit do not automatically transfer to another.
Spiced fruit in a sweet-sour syrup belongs to a long Anglo-American tradition of preserving the summer glut with sugar, vinegar and whole spice, and by the time community cookbooks like this one were compiled such preserves were expected at the table beside cold meat and roast fowl. Church and society cookbooks of the period were assembled from contributors' own handwriting, and abbreviated entries of this kind are typical, with the sugar and vinegar left unwritten. The reliance on market baskets as a unit also dates the page, from a time when fruit was bought by the container at a stand rather than by weight.