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Apricot Marmalade
Select some quite ripe apricots, stone and pass them through a sieve. Put into a preserving-pan two-thirds as much sugar as the quantity of apricots used, and mix in with the apricots, set the pan over the stove and allow the marmalade to reduce slowly till it coats the spoon and falls in large drops from it. Add some of the kernels of the apricots blanched in hot water and dried, and pour it into jars as you would jams. Apricot marmalade and apricot jam are virtually the same thing.
The fruit-and-sugar part of this is ordinary preserving practice, but the finishing step is not something to reproduce. Read the first two points before anything else.
- The kernels are the problemApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or digested. Bitter kernels can carry anywhere from under a milligram to a few milligrams of releasable cyanide each, and food safety authorities in the EU, UK and Australia now advise against eating them at all. Blanching and drying, as directed here, does not remove amygdalin.
- "Some of the kernels" is unmeasuredThe recipe gives no count and no weight, and nothing beyond taste to distinguish a sweet kernel from a bitter one. In a batch of marmalade that will be eaten by the spoonful over weeks, an unknown number of kernels is an unknown dose. Use a current apricot jam recipe instead.
- Open-kettle fillingPouring hot preserve into jars and sealing them, with no boiling-water process and no stated headspace or jar preparation, was standard in 1896 and is no longer considered adequate for shelf storage. Modern preserving guidance exists for a reason and should be followed.
- Preserving-panA wide, unlidded copper or heavy brass pan, valued for its shallow surface area and fast evaporation. The equivalent is any wide, heavy-bottomed non-reactive pan.
- Two-thirds as much sugarThe text is not explicit whether the sugar is weighed against the whole fruit or the sieved pulp. Either way it is a lower ratio than the equal-weights convention common in nineteenth-century jams, and less sugar tends to mean a shorter keeping life, which sits uneasily with the casual storage instruction.
- "Coats the spoon and falls in large drops"A spoon test of the same family as the sheeting test still used by working cooks, and it lands somewhere near the usual gel point of about 220F at sea level. The book itself gives no temperature.
"Marmalade" in a Waldorf-era kitchen still meant what it had meant for centuries: any fruit boiled down to a thick, spreadable paste, from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince preserve. The narrowing of the word to citrus is a later, largely British development, which is why Oscar can close by remarking that his apricot marmalade and his apricot jam are the same thing. The kernel is the older and more interesting survival here. Apricot and peach stones were long used as a cheap source of the bitter-almond flavour that also underlies ratafia and noyau liqueurs, and confectioners and preservers of the period seem to have added them to point up the fruit. That practice long predates any measurement of the cyanide involved, and it is the one part of the recipe the intervening century has genuinely overturned.