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Apricot Sauce
Cut some apricots in halves, remove and break the stones, blanch and pound the kernels and place, together with the fruit, in a saucepan with enough water to prevent them from burning. Pour over them a wineglassful of Madeira wine, and when the fruit is stewed quite soft, add sufficient sugar to sweeten, and a thickening of flour or arrowroot mixed with some water. Pass the sauce through a fine sieve into a sauceboat, and it is ready for use. Apricot jam and sherry may be substituted for the fresh apricots and Madeira, if desired.
The hinge of this recipe is also its problem: the pounded apricot kernels, added for the bitter-almond perfume that Victorian and Edwardian kitchens prized in stone-fruit cookery.
- The kernels are the hazardApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or steeped in water. Pounding them, as directed here, is precisely the action that liberates the toxin.
- No quantity is givenThe recipe says only "some apricots" and directs that all their kernels be used. Bitter apricot kernels have caused documented poisonings in small numbers, and there is no way to judge a dose from an instruction this vague.
- Blanching does not fix itBlanching loosens the skins; it does not destroy amygdalin. Nor does the brief stewing that follows.
- Sweet almond is not the same thingThe flavour being chased here is the almond-cherry note of benzaldehyde. Modern almond extract and commercial apricot kernel paste are formulated for it without the risk.
- If you want the sauceUse a current apricot sauce recipe. The remainder of Oscar's method — stew, sweeten, thicken, sieve — is unremarkable, and the kernels are the only reason this page carries a warning.
- On the wineglassfulFor context in reading the original: a wineglass in American cookbooks of this period is roughly two fluid ounces, a quarter cup. The Madeira-or-sherry substitution at the end tells you it is a flavouring rather than a structural ingredient.
Oscar Tschirky's kitchen inherited a long European habit of returning stone fruit to its own kernel for flavour — apricot, peach and cherry pits all carry the same bitter-almond aroma, and French confectionery leaned on them heavily for ratafia, noyau and fruit sauces. The practice is old enough to predate any understanding of why it was dangerous. Amygdalin was isolated in the 1830s and its release of hydrogen cyanide understood well before this book was written, and the technique has since retreated to commercial flavour manufacture, where extraction is controlled. The alternative Oscar offers at the end, jam and sherry in place of fresh fruit and Madeira, allowed a sauce to be made outside the fresh-apricot season, with the preserve cupboard standing in for the market.