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Apricot Jam
Split in two twenty-five pounds sound, fresh, ripe apricots. Remove stones, place twenty pounds granulated sugar in copper basin with a vanilla stick and three pints cold water. Set basin on a brisk fire and as soon as syrup begins to bubble immediately drop in apricots all at once, lightly stir and let gently cook for thirty minutes. Remove, lift up apricots with a skimmer, place in warmed-up glasses, boil syrup for five minutes and fill up glasses with it. Let thoroughly cool. Cover jam with waxed pieces of paper lightly dipped in brandy, then tightly cover, place in a cool place and use as desired. N. B. After placing apricots in glasses crack stones, pick out almonds, plunge them in boiling water for three minutes, drain and evenly divide in glasses with apricots before syrup is poured in.
A professional, hotel-scale preserve: 25 lb of fruit to 20 lb of sugar, cooked in an open copper basin and sealed with nothing but brandied paper. Two parts of it fall outside what can be recommended now.
- The kernels in the N.B. are the problemApricot stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or digested. A three-minute blanch in water does not remove the amygdalin, and there is no way to tell from the outside whether a given tree's kernels are the mild or the bitter sort. European food-safety assessments suggest an adult can exceed the acute reference dose after only a few small kernels; this recipe divides the kernels from twenty-five pounds of fruit among the jars.
- SealingWaxed paper dipped in brandy laid over cooling jam, then covered and kept in a cool place, was a standard nineteenth-century closure. It is not a seal in the modern sense: the recipe gives no headspace, no jar sterilising and no processing time, and mould or yeast spoilage on unprocessed preserves is a common outcome. Use a current tested preserving method if you want to keep fruit in jars.
- Copper basinUnlined copper was the professional preserving pan because it conducts heat evenly and was believed to help green fruit hold colour. Acidic fruit standing in unlined copper does dissolve some of it, and stainless or enamelled steel is the usual modern substitute.
- ScaleTwenty-five pounds of apricots and twenty of sugar is a day's batch for a hotel pantry, and yields far more than a household would put up at once. The thirty-minute cook is timed to that quantity in a wide pan.
- "Glasses"The glass preserve jars of the period, warmed before filling so they would not crack. Not drinking glasses.
- "Brisk fire" and "vanilla stick"A brisk fire is full heat under the pan. A vanilla stick is a whole vanilla bean, put in with the sugar and water; the recipe does not say what becomes of it.
- Why the fruit is lifted out firstThirty minutes at a gentle bubble sets the halves without collapsing them; the syrup is then boiled hard alone for five minutes to thicken it. This gives whole-fruit preserve rather than a smooth jam, which is what the book means by the word here.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reads like a professional's notebook opened to the public: quantities in the twenties of pounds, copper basins, syrup stages given by eye. The kernel trick in the postscript belongs to an old European habit of flavouring apricot and plum preserves with the fruit's own stone, the same logic behind noyau liqueurs and the German persipan, a marzipan substitute made from apricot or peach kernels; the kernel tastes of bitter almond because it contains much the same compound that makes bitter almonds bitter, which is precisely why the practice has been abandoned. Brandy-dipped paper as a jar cover was common in nineteenth-century preserving manuals, the alcohol traditionally said to act as a mild surface antiseptic in the years before the boiling-water bath and the screw-band lid became household equipment.