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Hydrated Apricots
1 pound dried apricots 2 1/2 cups water Look the apricots over carefully. Wash, and soak in two and one-half cups of water for twelve hours. When thoroughly softened, add sugar to taste and serve uncooked.
A recipe that is really a technique: cold water, time, and nothing else. The only variables are the fruit you start with and where you leave the bowl.
- The hingeNothing is cooked, so the whole dish depends on a full soak. Twelve hours is not padding — undersoaked apricots stay leathery at the center and the syrup never develops. Press one between finger and thumb; it should yield with no firm core.
- Soak in the refrigeratorFruit standing twelve hours in water in a warm kitchen can begin to ferment. Cover it and soak it cold; the fruit softens just as well, only slightly slower. (Note that the recipe adds the sugar after the soak, not before.)
- Apricots have changedMany bright-orange dried apricots sold today are sulfured and comparatively moist, and may soften in less than the full twelve hours. Unsulfured, dark-brown apricots are drier and tougher and will want the full twelve, sometimes more.
- Water ratioTwo and a half cups to a pound is a modest amount of liquid, much of which the fruit takes up, so what is left is fruit-flavoured rather than watery. The recipe gives no instruction to drain.
- Sugar to tasteThe recipe adds it at the end, after the soak. Go lightly at first and taste; the sweetness reads differently once the fruit is cold.
- Yield and servingA pound of dried apricots serves six to eight as a dessert. Good with cream, plain yogurt, or a spoonful over rice pudding or oatmeal.
"Hydrated" is an unusually clinical word for a kitchen instruction, and points to a period when cookbooks explained what soaking did to dried fruit and promoted it as a thrifty, shippable staple. An uncooked fruit dessert uses no range time at all, which suited households being urged to economise on fuel. California and Mediterranean dried apricots were widely traded by the early twentieth century, and the instruction to "look the apricots over carefully" is consistent with dried fruit sold loose rather than pre-cleaned and packaged. The result is close to what a modern cook would call a compote, made without heat.