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Dried Apricot Conserve
1/2 Pound (12-3 Cups) Dried Apricots 2 Cups Cold Water 1 Cup Raisins Juice 1 Lemon 1 Orange 1/2 Cup Nutmeats 1 Cup Light Corn Syrup Soak apricots over night in cold water.
When soaked add raisins, lemon juice, orange sliced very thin and cut in small pieces, and corn syrup. Bring to boiling point and simmer for about an hour and a quarter. Add nuts 15 minutes before taking from fire. (Makes 1/4 quarts.)
A stovetop conserve rather than a jelly: whole fruit, dried fruit and nuts cooked down in syrup until thick. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the printed figures need reading through.
- The garbled apricot measure"1/2 Pound (12-3 Cups)" is plainly a typesetting slip, though what it was meant to read is guesswork. Half a pound of dried apricot halves runs to somewhere around one and a half to two cups loosely packed; go by the weight, which is unambiguous.
- The yield"Makes 1/4 quarts" should read 1 1/4 quarts, or about five cups. That is consistent with the volume of fruit and syrup going in.
- Corn syrupLight corn syrup in this period meant the same glucose syrup sold today; it is not high-fructose corn syrup, which came later. It keeps the conserve soft and glossy and discourages crystallising, but contributes little set, so the thickening comes mainly from evaporation and from the pectin in the fruit, the orange especially.
- The whole orangePeel, pith and all go in, sliced paper-thin and chopped. That is the pectin and the bitterness that keeps the thing from being cloying. Scrub the fruit; a thick-skinned navel orange wants slicing thinner than you think.
- Simmer and stirAn hour and a quarter is right for reducing this to a spoonable consistency, but the sugar-heavy mixture scorches readily in the last twenty minutes. Use a heavy pan and stir up from the bottom often.
- NutmeatsSimply shelled nuts; walnuts or pecans would be the usual choice in American books of this vintage. Adding them fifteen minutes from the end is deliberate: long enough to take on flavour, short enough that they do not go soft.
- StorageNo canning process is given, and none should be improvised. Treat this as a refrigerator conserve, cover it, and use it within a few weeks; for shelf-stable jars follow a current tested water-bath procedure.
A conserve, as distinct from a jam or a marmalade, is a preserve carrying whole or large pieces of fruit plus additions the fruit did not grow with, most often raisins, citrus and nuts. The type was a fixture of American community and promotional cookbooks from the 1910s through the 1940s, and this one shows its date in two ways: it leans on dried fruit, available year-round and cheap, and it uses corn syrup in place of some or all of the sugar. Corn syrup was heavily marketed to home cooks in that era, and household economists recommended it during both wars when cane sugar was rationed or dear.