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Apricot Brandy
Mix half a pound of sugar and a little water with every two dozen apricots used; boil up and then remove and place in jars, and when cold, fill them up with brandy. Cover over securely and allow them to remain for several days, when they are ready for use. They may be carefully and thinly peeled before putting into the syrup, although this is not generally done.
A brandied-fruit preserve rather than a distilled spirit: whole apricots are blanched in a light syrup, then covered with brandy already made. The original gives ratios by the dozen, so a little translation helps.
- Scale and yieldTwo dozen apricots to half a pound of sugar (about 1 cup) works out to roughly 2 lb of fruit per cup of sugar. Twenty-four medium apricots, closely packed, will fill on the order of a quart, and will take a good part of a bottle of brandy to cover.
- "A little water"Enough to dissolve the sugar and keep it from catching; the recipe gives no quantity, and something like half a cup per pound of sugar is one workable reading. This is a thin syrup meant to sweeten and soften the fruit, not a heavy canning syrup.
- Boil up, and no moreThe hinge of the recipe. The fruit goes into the syrup only until it is heated through and the skins tighten, a minute or two for ripe apricots. Anything longer and they collapse into jam when the brandy goes in.
- Alcohol strength mattersThe brandy is the preservative, and syrup plus fruit juice dilute it. Pack the fruit tightly, use a standard 80-proof brandy rather than a low-proof fruit liqueur, and keep syrup to a minimum so the finished jar stays well above 20 percent alcohol.
- StorageDespite the confident "cover over securely," this is not a sealed, processed preserve. Use clean jars with new lids, refrigerate, and keep the fruit fully submerged; anything that rises above the liquid will discolour and spoil.
- "Several days"Optimistic. A few days makes the fruit taste of brandy; three to four weeks lets the almond note from the stones come through and the syrup and spirit marry.
- PeelingOscar's aside is sound. A ten-second dip in boiling water slips apricot skins easily, and peeled fruit gives a clearer liquor, but the skins help the fruit keep its shape and carry most of the colour.
- ServingBoth fruit and liquor are usable: the apricots as a dessert fruit, the brandy itself as a cordial. The recipe itself says nothing about how it was served.
Fruit steeped in spirit and sugar is one of the oldest ways of holding summer over into winter, and the practice sits somewhere between preserving and liqueur-making, the same impulse behind French eaux-de-vie and English ratafias. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, gathered this into his 1896 Cook Book alongside a great deal of straightforward household matter; the book was aimed at the ambitious home kitchen as much as the hotel one, and brandied fruit is often said to have been the sort of thing an American household made when the crop was cheap. Apricots bruise and spoil quickly, which may be a large part of why so many recipes of the period exist for putting them straight into sugar or spirit.