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Stewed Apricots
1/2 pound apricots 1/2 cup sugar Water Wash, and sort the fruit, cover with cold water, and soak several hours, or over night. Long soaking improves all dried fruits. Put in enough water to cover, and bring to the boiling point. Drain, and cover again with cold water. Cook slowly until apricots are tender, then add the sugar. Stir lightly, and cook five minutes. Serve cold.
To make an apricot sauce, force through a strainer, and add orange juice to taste.
A simple dried-fruit compote from the era when dried apricots were a winter staple rather than a snack. The recipe's oddity is the double water — one blanch, discarded, then fresh water for the actual cooking.
- Why the water is thrown awayDried apricots of the period were commonly sulphured and often dusty from open barrels, and a first boil-and-drain would have rinsed off both, though the recipe gives no reason for the step. With modern packaged fruit it can be skipped; draining does discard some flavor, and the soaking water can simply be used as the cooking water.
- Sugar goes in last, and that mattersSugar added early slows the softening of the fruit, so it takes considerably longer to become tender. Cook the apricots until yielding first, then sweeten and give them the five minutes stated.
- Quantity and yieldHalf a pound of dried apricots is roughly 1 1/2 cups, and swells to about 3 cups cooked — four modest servings. The half cup of sugar is generous by current taste; a third of a cup suits most modern palates and better-quality fruit.
- TimingAfter an overnight soak, tender takes roughly 15 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer. Unsoaked fruit will need considerably longer, and the extra cooking is harder on the halves.
- Keep it barely bubbling"Cook slowly" is doing real work here. A hard boil breaks the halves into threads; you want the surface just trembling so the fruit stays whole in its syrup.
- The sauce variationForcing through a strainer gives a thick purée — a food mill or a short blitz in a blender does the same faster. Orange juice both thins it and cuts the sweetness; start with two tablespoons per cup of purée.
- ServingServed cold, as the book directs, it works as a dessert with cream or plain custard, and the strained version is good over rice pudding or spooned onto hot cereal.
Dried apricots came into American kitchens in quantity from California, where commercial orchards in the Santa Clara and Sacramento valleys were drying fruit on trays by the late nineteenth century, and sulphured halves shipped and kept well enough to be a year-round pantry item. That reliability is why stewed dried fruits appear so readily in the dessert chapters of books like this one: a sweet course that asked nothing of the butcher and little of the season. The instruction that "long soaking improves all dried fruits" is the sort of blanket kitchen maxim these books traded in — rehydration lets the interior soften at the same rate as the surface, and cooks of the period often had little way of knowing how old or how hard their fruit was.