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Marmalade of Canned Apricots
2 cupfuls of sugar to 2 cupfuls of apricot pulp. Drain the fruit from the syrup by pouring all into a colander set in a saucepan. Press the frui through the colander into another vessel and measure it. Put as much sugar by measure into the apricot juice in the saucepan and boil them gently for half an hour, skimming once; then put in the mashed apricot and simmer down thick.
A short-cut preserve built on canned fruit rather than fresh, and it still works — with a few adjustments for how canned apricots are packed today.
- The hinge: cook the syrup first, the pulp lastThe half-hour boil is for the sugar and juice alone; the pulp goes in only at the end. Adding it early scorches the fruit solids and dulls the colour long before the marmalade thickens.
- Canned fruit has changedApricots of this period were commonly canned in heavy syrup, so the drained liquid was itself sweet. Note that the recipe matches the sugar to the measure of the pulp, not of the juice. Fruit packed in juice or light syrup gives a thinner, more acidic liquid — start with about three-quarters of the sugar by volume and taste before the pulp goes in.
- QuantitiesTwo 15-oz cans, well drained, yield roughly 2 cups of pulp and something like 1 to 1½ cups of syrup. Scaled that way the recipe makes on the order of 2 to 2½ cups of finished marmalade, or two to three half-pint jars.
- Colander or sieveUse a medium-mesh sieve and a flexible spatula, or simply mash the apricots — the finished texture is meant to be soft and slightly fibrous, not smooth.
- "Simmer down thick"Aim for 220F on a thermometer, or the cold-plate test: a spoonful on a chilled saucer should wrinkle when pushed. Canned apricots are low in pectin, so expect a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm jelly. Stir constantly once the pulp is in; it catches quickly.
- SkimmingThe single skim removes the foam that rises as the sugar dissolves. A small knob of butter stirred into the syrup does the same job with less waste.
- Keeping itThere is no processing step here. Treat it as a refrigerator marmalade, good for about three weeks, or freeze it. For shelf storage, follow current water-bath canning directions.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals written for hotel and bakery kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century, where speed and consistency mattered more than seasonality — hence a marmalade made from tinned fruit in the middle of winter. Commercial canning of California apricots expanded rapidly in the last decades of the 1800s, and the canned fruit arrived already cooked and packed in heavy syrup, which is why this recipe treats the drained syrup as a working ingredient rather than something to discard. The word "marmalade" here carries its older, broader English sense of any fruit boiled to a thick mass with sugar; the narrowing of the term to citrus alone is largely a later British convention. Recipes of this type — pulp measured by the cupful, sugar matched to it by volume — reflect a kitchen that worked from a measuring cup and a rule of thumb rather than a scale.