Home › The World's Kitchen › Apricot Marmalade
Apricot Marmalade
Procure twenty-five pounds ripe, sound, juicy apricots, cut in halves, remove stones, cut each half in two and place in a large enamelled pan. Add a quart cold water and pound granulated sugar, set pan on brisk fire and cook until soft to the touch, frequently stirring meanwhile with spatula, remove and press apricots through sieve into an earthen basin. Place three-quarters of a pound granulated sugar with every pound of juice in a copper basin, pour in two gills water, cook sugar on open fire for ten minutes, add puree of apricots with a teaspoon vanilla essence, and constantly mix while cooking for twelve minutes. Remove, crack stones with a hammer, pick out almonds, plunge in boiling water for five minutes, peel and add to marmalade five minutes before taking off fire. Remove to a table, transfer marmalade into jars, let thoroughly cool, place over thin pieces of paper lightly dipped in brandy and cover jars. The marmalade is then ready; keep in a cool place.
This is a nineteenth-century preserving method built around two things current practice rejects: the deliberate addition of apricot kernels, and a jar closure that seals nothing. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The kernels are the problemThe instruction to crack the stones, blanch the inner "almonds" and stir them into the finished marmalade adds amygdalin, which breaks down in the body to hydrogen cyanide. Apricot kernels are the classic culinary source of this compound, and food safety authorities in several countries now advise against eating them at all.
- The quantity is far out of rangeTwenty-five pounds of apricots yields several hundred stones. Even allowing that kernel bitterness varies with variety, the kernels from that much fruit represent a dose no modern guidance would sanction, and the short cooking here should not be relied on to destroy the toxic products.
- The seal is not a sealBrandy-dipped paper laid on the surface and a cover on top is open-kettle preserving. The alcohol discourages surface mould for a while, but the jars are never processed, so there is no vacuum and no barrier against recontamination. Current jam practice is a boiling-water bath with measured headspace and time.
- Sugar ratio and acidityThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of purée is a genuine high-sugar preserve, which is what carried this recipe for decades. That is a real preservative effect, but on its own it does not substitute for a proper seal, and it does nothing about the kernels.
- Unlined copperThe "copper basin" was the standard confectioner's preserving pan and it conducts beautifully, but bare copper in prolonged contact with acidic fruit can leach. Old kitchens accepted this; modern preserving pans are often stainless or lined.
- Units, for reading the textA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. The "pound granulated sugar" in the first stage is ambiguous as printed — one pound against twenty-five pounds of fruit and a quart of water reads as a token addition for the initial softening, not the sweetening, which comes later.
- If you want apricot marmaladeUse a current tested recipe with a measured pectin and acid balance and a water-bath process. Leave the stones out.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) collected the repertoire of a professional hotel and restaurant kitchen, which is why the scale here is twenty-five pounds of fruit and the vessels are a copper confectioner's basin and an earthen bowl rather than anything domestic. The kernel step is not an eccentricity of his: the blanched inner seed of the apricot, peach or bitter almond was a standard European flavouring, the basis of noyau liqueurs and of the almond note in much old stone-fruit cookery, and cooks reached for it precisely because it intensifies the fruit's own perfume — Filippini hedges his bets by adding vanilla as well. The brandy-soaked paper laid directly on the surface of a cooled preserve is an older technique still, generally traced to the era before reliable glass closures, when a film of spirit was the best available guard against surface mould. Both practices survived well into the twentieth century in print, long after the chemistry of amygdalin was understood, which is a reminder of how slowly kitchen tradition absorbs laboratory knowledge.